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RELIGION AS LIFE 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

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ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



RELIGION AS LIFE 



BY 

HENRY CHURCHILL KING, D.D., LL.D. 

PRESIDENT OF OBERLIN COLLEGE 



Nein fork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1913 

jiU rights reser-ved 



5^i:i 



Copyright, 1913, 
By the MACMILLAX COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotjrped. Published May, 1913. 



J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S. A 



)CLA346723 





CONTENTS 




CHAPTER 

I. The Choice op Life . 


PAGE 

3 


II. 


The Method of Life . 


. . 36 


III. 


The Realities of Life 


. 71 


IV. 


The Sources of Life . 


. 105 


V. 


The Enemies of Life . 


• 134 


VI. 


The Essence of Life . 


. 162 



RELIGION AS LIFE 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 

The Peril of the Lesser Good 

If one is to do justice to the breadth of 
hiiman nature, he may not forget that 
there are always two questions to be asked 
concerning any of the phenomena of the 
world and of life : How did it come to be ? 
What does it mean ? — the question of 
process, of mechanical explanation, and the 
question of meaning, of ideal interpreta- 
tion. And men cannot help asking the 
second question as well as the first. As 
Watts says, endeavoring to put into words 
the constant thought back of all his own 
work as an artist: ''As long as htmianity 
is himianity, man will yearn to ascend 
the heights that human footsteps may not 
tread, and will long to lift the veil that 
shrouds the enigma of being; and he will 
most prize the echo of this longing in even 
the incoherent expression of literature, 



RELIGION AS LIFE 



music, and art." The ideal interests are 
here all at one ; for they all seek to find 
meaning in life, and they all voice an under- 
lying faith, which, it may be suspected, 
finds its natural and inevitable culmination 
and justification in religion. One probably 
has nowhere fathomed the mysterious power 
of beauty, for example, until he finds in it, 
as Lotze has suggested, the prophecy and 
promise of final and universal harmony — 
an essentially religious conviction. 

The very conception of religion as life, 
implies that religious faith is thus basic, 
and has the power ever3rwhere to give 
meaning and value to life ; that it stands in 
every realm for the largest, richest, most 
rewarding life. Even when religion is so 
conceived, the question that first arises is 
this : Does one really want life, the largest 
life, though it appear in the guise of diffi- 
culty and self-denial ? Does one decisively 
choose it with his whole being ? — the ques- 
tion of the choice of life. The second ques- 
tion then follows : Can one get some clear 
view of the method of life, and see here 
the essential unity of religion with all life, 
in the double demand for inner integrity 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 



and fellowship ? That method, it will be 
found, inevitably includes an honest facing 
of the facts of life, a thoughtful recognition 
of the outstanding realities of the spiritual 
world. Just because the method of life 
includes, also, as everywhere requisite, 
fellowship, men are driven to find the great 
sources of life, short of God himself, in the 
most rewarding personalities of the moral 
and religious sphere, and so to give special 
place to the great line of prophetic seers of 
the spiritual, culminating in Jesus. But the 
whole range of the moral and religious life 
is in the realm of personal relations, and one 
has not fully learned the lesson of the life 
of Jesus, nor squarely faced the facts of 
life, until he has confronted the enemies of 
life arising out of these personal relations. 
This darker side cannot be honestly ignored. 
But it is the characteristic message of the 
life of Jesus, that the enemies of life cannot 
finally defeat the true soul in its quest for 
the largest life either for itself or for others. 
In clear vision of the darker aspect of life, 
therefore, religion may still conceive the 
great outstanding personalities and realities 
of the spiritual realm as at least a partial 



RELIGION AS LIFE 



revelation of the will of God, and must find 
the essence of its life in harmony with that 
will of God. For religion must tiltimately 
mean some real sharing in the life of God 
himself. It is such a survey of religion as 
life, that is here undertaken. 

Our age is often called an irreligious — 
an unideal — age. The truth of the state- 
ment may well be doubted. The age is a 
realistic age, in the sense that it wants to 
know that everywhere it is dealing with 
reality — that it is not deceiving itself 
with even the fondest of delusions. And 
from that test religion has no right to with- 
draw itself. But that the age is averse to 
religious life and faith where they have 
the ring of reality, it would be difficult 
indeed to show. Men cannot so easily 
escape their own natures and the grip of 
their own birthright. 

The seeming declension in religious faith 
is probably due in part to the waning power 
of authority in the religious sphere, because 
of the increasing demand in this realm, as 
in all others, for the verification of expe- 
rience. But this is, in truth, an evidence 
of greater not less earnestness in the 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 



pursuit of religion. For it is a refusal to 
substitute the mere say-so of some other 
for living experience on one's own part. 
In that result every believer in the insight 
of the teaching of Jesus may rejoice ; for 
Jesus sought nothing else so persistently 
as this utter reality in the spiritual life. 
He has indeed no plea to make for any 
religion that does not mean the experience 
of a larger, richer life. He deliberately 
courts that test: ''I came that they may 
have life, and may have it abundantly." 
He has no criticism of men's thirst for life. 
He only has pity that they seek to satisfy 
the thirst at such unpromising springs. 
He could not have objected to the line of 
argument of a great German theologian, 
that the truth of religion is best shown by 
the fact that it alone can quite satisfy 
men's ^'' claim on life." That must seem 
to him the most obvious inference from his 
own initial faith in the Father. Life — 
large and rich and free, increasing, inex- 
haustible life, because sharing in God's 
own life ! This, religion must be able to 
offer, if it is to abide. For man cannot give 
up the quest for life. Can religion still 



8 RELIGION AS LIFE 

make good this offer even for the modem 
man ? 

All forms of frivolity and passion, even, 
think of themselves as seeking life. The 
men who yield to them say that they want 
to ''see life" ; that they want to ''live while 
they live." And there is a certain uncon- 
scious logic in their claim ; for they all 
seek some kind of emotional excitement. 
Now it is quite true that one cannot get 
the tang of reality in existence without some 
stirring of emotion. None of us has any 
right to forget this close and inevitable 
connection of the sense of reality with 
feeling. The claim of feeling, therefore, 
cannot be ignored by any interest or cause, 
however ideal. Unless religion, then, has 
power to awaken such faith and hope and 
love as insure profounder depths of feeling, 
as are able to make all the natural joys of 
men instinct with far richer meaning, and 
as can give permanent satisfaction to the 
greatest in us, it must fail. 

The momentous building up of the senti- 
ment of romantic love, in the history of 
western civilization, is a good illustration 
of the way in which ideal interests have 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 



this power immensely to deepen and 
heighten natural feeling. And romantic 
love cannot come to its supreme height 
without full religious faith, as many of our 
best love songs quite unconsciously testify. 
Now exactly the kind of transformation 
that the ideal interests have brought about 
in the natural attraction of the sexes, 
religion believes that it can bring into 
every part of life. And it blames the 
devotee of frivolity and passion, because 
at every point he prefers the shallow and 
fragmentary and steadily lessening and 
self -centered life, to the profounder and 
larger and steadily growing and all-em- 
bracing life open to him. It sees, there- 
fore, how inevitable was the yearning pro- 
test which the old Evangelist put into 
the mouth of Christ: '*Ye will not come 
unto me that ye may have life." The 
thing that so stirs the soul of Jesus is, that 
men are so constantly striving to satisfy 
the quenchless thirst for life, of natures 
capable of endless development, with at 
best petty goods. So Browning in his 
Easter Day sees that no severer judgment 
could be pronounced upon a man, willingly 



10 RELIGION AS LIFE 

falling below the best, than that he should 
be permanently shut up to the goals he 
himself has chosen : 

The austere voice returned, — 
' So soon made happy ? Hadst thou learned 
What God accounteth happiness, 
Thou wouldst not find it hard to guess 
What hell may be his punishment 
For those who doubt if God invent 
Better than they. Let such men rest 
Content with what they judged the best. 
Let the unjust usurp at will ! 
The filthy shall be filthy still ! 
Miser, there waits the gold for thee ! 
Hater, indulge thine enmity ! 
And thou, whose heaven self -ordained 
Was, to enjoy earth unrestrained, 
Do it I' 

Now the gradual building up, in all pro- 
gressive civilizations, of some kind of ideal 
interests, means that it is the experience 
of the race that men cannot continuously 
get more life without deepening life. It 
is a necessarily narrow life that stays on a 
mere sense level. The choice of the larger 
life must mean, therefore, just such steady 
deepening of life. The very existence, 
indeed, of art, of science, of philosophy, 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE ii 

of ethics, of sociology, and of religion is 
evidence that man is more than a creature 
of the senses ; that it belongs to his very- 
nature to set aims that take him beyond 
the sense world ; that each of these achieve- 
ments is an ideal which man's own nature 
sets before him for accomplishment — is, 
in Miinsterberg's language, ^'a child of 
duties." From the point of view of re- 
ligion, therefore, that believes in God as 
Creator of man, body and soul, these ideals 
are all at least a partial revelation of the 
will of God for man ; and religion may be 
said thus to take up into itself all the other 
ideals ; and, alone of all the ideals, to give 
man's life the permanent meaning of re- 
lation to the Eternal. The religious life, 
therefore, should give the greatest deepen- 
ing of life possible. 

Our own time, with all its prodigious 
material and intellectual achievements and 
its unequaled material development, it- 
self seems more and more to be awaking 
to the fact that no one nor all of these are 
sufficient of themselves to give meaning 
and value to life. The world never had 
such enormous resources of power and 



12 RELIGION AS LIFE 

wealth and knowledge, never so great 
means of all kinds. We are, indeed, in 
danger of finding our lives swamped by 
the very magnitude of our possessions. 
Just because our resources are so prodigious, 
there is the indispensable need for men of 
spiritual insight and vision and passion, 
men of assured relation to God, and there- 
fore men of dynamic power to guide these 
stupendous lower forces to ideal ends. 
Thoughtful men, thus, seem constrained 
increasingly to ask themselves whether 
the age is to be great enough to be able to 
make these stupendous resources, means 
indeed. Eucken's protest, making just now 
so wide an appeal, is surely symptomatic 
of the time. ''To every thinking man," 
he says, ''the great alternative presents 
itself, the Either-Or. Either there is some- 
thing other and higher than this purely 
humanistic culture, or life ceases to have 
any meaning or value." "Not suffering," 
he says elsewhere, "but spiritual destitu- 
tion is man's worst enemy." But spiritual 
destitution cannot be relieved from with- 
out. It requires, indispensably, inner 
spiritual activity, growing insight, decision 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 13 

and choice on one's own part. Any truly 
spiritual view of life must therefore put, 
as Eucken does, this free choosing and 
decision in the foreground. Even the in- 
tellectual inheritance of the achievements of 
modern science cannot come to a man with- 
out earnest labor and appropriation on his 
own part. Still less can the meaning of the 
spiritual life be his without active personal 
appropriation. 

It is not by accident, therefore, that one 
is led to put at the very beginning of any 
thoroughgoing consideration of religion 
as life, the choice of life, — and that choice 
as made with all ethical earnestness and 
decision. We may well raise the question 
whether our time, in the reaction from abuse 
of mere appeals to the will — has not been 
ignoring quite too much the strategic place 
that definite and avowed decision must 
have in the development of the spiritual life. 
Dr. Bushnell's account of his own expe- 
rience may suggest how vitally important 
such spiritual decisions may be. ''A kind 
of leaden aspect overhangs the world. 
Till, finally, pacing his chamber some day, 
there comes up suddenly the question, 



14 RELIGION AS LIFE 

' Is there then no truth that I do believe ? ' 
'Yes, there is this one, now that I think of 
it ; there is a distinction of right and wrong 
that I never doubted, and I see not how I 
can; I am even quite sure of it.' x Then 
forthwith starts up the question, 'Have 
I then ever taken the principle of right 
for my law? I have done right things as 
men speak ; have I ever thrown my life 
out on the principle to become all it re- 
quires of me ? ' ' No, I have not, con- 
sciously, I have not. Ah ! then, here is 
something for me to do ! No matter what 
becomes of my questions — nothing ought 
to become of them, if I cannot take a first 
principle, so inevitably true, and live in it.* 
The very suggestion seems to be a kind of 
revelation. It is even a relief to feel the 
conviction it brings. 'Here, then,' he says, 
'will I begin.' " That striking scene in the 
history of Israel, in the Valley of Shechem, 
with Israel divided into the two groups on 
Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, to re- 
spond, the one to the curses and the other 
to the blessings, between which they are 
to choose, sets forth dramatically the per- 
petual challenge to humanity. For life is 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 15 

constantly saying, as there: *'I have set 
before thee Hfe and death, the blessing and 
the curse. Therefore choose life that thou 
mayest live/' No man chooses a curse as 
such. He chooses it under the guise of 
some kind of good, or as at least accom- 
panied by a good that seems to him to 
make up for the curse. Man's peril is 
always, therefore, that of the lesser good. 
And it is this peril that demands so insis- 
tently the choice of life. 

There is a section of the teaching of 
Jesus, in a single chapter in Mark (Mark 
10), that deals with exactly this peril of 
the lesser good in three of the common 
realms of life : the realms of wealth, of love, 
and of ambition. These teachings may well 
challenge our attention when we are thinking 
of what it really means to choose life. 

It is a characteristically compact and 
vivid picture which Mark gives of the young 
man who runs to Jesus, as he is going out 
into the highway, throws himself on his 
knees before him, out of the consciousness 
of a clean and tipright life voices his further 
aspiration and wins from Jesus his look of 
love, only to find himself unable to respond 



i6 RELIGION AS LIFE 

to Christ's full call to abandon his wealth 
and follow him, and goes away with fallen 
countenance, sorrowful. 

The ordinary reader of the Gospel, it 
may be suspected, would underwrite this 
incident of the rich young ruler with the 
subtitle, ''A Hard Test." Dante, with 
keener insight, calls it ''The Great Refusal.'* 
For it is exactly this common inability to 
see that the failure to meet the hard test 
is a great refusal of life, that makes life's 
tragedy. We see the hardness of the test ; 
Jesus and Dante see the greatness of the 
life refused. For here, in this New Testa- 
ment incident, is the appeal of eager, beau- 
tiful, upright, aspiring youth. Jesus loves 
him and covets for him a far greater destiny 
than he has yet achieved — high service 
in his kingdom. But the young man's 
riches are too strong for his aspiration. He 
cannot rise to the height of Jesus' call. 
Reluctantly, indeed, but surely he puts the 
great opportunity aside — for it was the 
proffer of life in the guise of self-denial. 
Not, thus, in desperate wickedness, but in 
simple peril of the lower good, he makes 
"the great refusal." 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 17 

The story is a perpetual parable of human 
struggle ; for life's supreme test and chal- 
lenge are never — as men so commonly 
think — Can you withstand the evil ? but 
rather, Can you rise superior to the lower 
goods ? The constant struggle is between 
aspiration, on the one hand, and one's 
already ''great possessions," on the other. 
Everywhere life brings the challenge of 
the call to denial of the lower ; the soul 
responds either with the great commit- 
ment or ''the great refusal." 

This figure of the rich young ruler is one 
fit to stir any man to serious thought. 
For his is no sordid soul. He is still warmly 
touched with the eager aspiration of youth. 
The spell of the "great possessions," it is 
true, is already on him, as Christ clearly 
sees ; but it has not yet been fully wrought ; 
he is no "swine of Circe" who does not 
longer care. And one can hardly help 
imagining a different issue of this conversa- 
tion with Christ. Suppose the rich young 
ruler had risen to the occasion and the 
result were changed ? 

The test which Jesus applies seems very 
severe to us, with our modem love of riches, 



i8 RELIGION AS LIFE 

and it is hard enough. But his "great 
possessions" were all too evidently coming 
to own him, rather than he to own them ; 
and they were sure to corrode his life. The 
question which Jesus really brought to 
him that day on the highway was, Have 
you the nerve, the grit, the simple, plain, 
high wisdom to cut off this deeply corroding 
element that is eating into your very life ? 

It seems a hard test. But suppose he 
had met Christ's challenge and follow^ed 
him positively, to play such a part as Paul 
played ? Suppose he had been clear-sighted 
and strong-souled enough to enter into his 
supreme opportunity ? Who would have 
pitied him ? Would he have needed any 
one's pity, and not rather had deep admira- 
tion and the envy of all high souls, and 
given heroic inspiration, and have become 
one of the great life-giving forces of the 
world ? Something like that he had before 
him. Something like that Jesus offered 
him that day in the guise of his severe test. 
In soberest reason, were his ''great posses- 
sions" worth the price he paid? Did he 
not make "the great refusal" ? 

It is a hard test ? Yes, but how great 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 19 

the opportunity ! For the seeming hard 
demand — the call for sacrifice in the uni- 
verse of God — is always a call, could 
we but believe it, to larger life, to wider 
outlook, to more permanent service. And 
life's constant question is, Are you equal 
to the call ? Can you rise to it ? Can you 
meet the challenge of your best possibility ? 
Or must you be ''let off"? Can you so 
feel the appeal of the greater glory as to 
loosen the hold of the lower on you ? Can 
you escape from the thralldom of the in- 
ferior good into life ? We have great as- 
pirations and occasional visions ; have we 
the determination to follow them to the 
end, or, with fallen countenance and sor- 
rowful spirit, must we go away from the 
uplands of life, enchained by our ''great 
possessions" ? 

It is a hard test ? Yes, but were the 
"great possessions" so sure a blessing? 
Had they so much to give ? Had they 
rather no heavy price which they were 
certain to demand, and were they to take 
it out of the young man's life ? It is this 
aspect of the matter that is so forced on 
Christ's mind as, in words of the most 



20 RELIGION AS LIFE 

solemn warning, he comments on the going 
away of the rich young ruler. 

Three times, in unmistakable terms, 
Jesus asserts his sense of the tremendous 
peril of wealth. "How hardly," he says 
to his disciples, ''shall they that have riches 
enter into the kingdom of God." And this 
solemn warning of Jesus we are ready to 
treat almost as a joke. We are ''willing," 
our newspaper paragraphers say, " to run 
the risks of wealth." But let no man think 
it a trifling risk, or one lightly to be entered 
on. For the danger of the rich young 
ruler, we may be pretty certain, is one of 
the greatest dangers that besets our own 
people to-day, nationally and individually. 
When one recalls the revelations of the 
recent years, beginning with the insurance 
investigations, and remembers the shame- 
less willingness disclosed everywhere to 
sacrifice public interests to private gain, he 
cannot doubt the magnitude of the peril 
to the nation's life. 

It was one of the most thoughtful of 
American editors that wrote of this phase 
of our national history : ' ' That we are 
passing through a great moral crisis be- 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 21 

comes every day more clear. That crisis 
has come not a day too soon, if the soul of 
the country is to be kept alive ; it cannot 
be too severe in its arraignment of baseness, 
too thorough in the punishment it inflicts, 
too drastic in the methods of cleansing and 
reinvigoration which it adopts. There has 
never been a more shocking story of dis- 
honor told among any people, nor one 
which makes the reader or hearer more 
indignant or ashamed. In whatever direc- 
tion the light searches, instantly mean 
little men of great financial position come 
into startling light, and are seen managing 
affairs with great financial ability but with 
the moral ideas of semi-savages. An un- 
endurable moral vulgarity stamps them 
as men of large brains and little souls ; 
capable of great material achievements, 
but with rudimentary spiritual development. 
On this group of betrayers of trusts the 
great mass of Americans looked first with 
incredulity, then with astonishment, and 
lastly with deepening indignation. Sound 
at heart, but dull with prosperity, and 
overtaken by a kind of moral sleeping sick- 
ness, the Nation opens its eyes, looks about 



22 RELIGION AS LIFE 

with dismay, and gathers its forces for a 
passionate fight against the vices that have 
brought shame and disaster to it." 

And since those words were written, how 
heavy has been the price paid in dishonor 
for simple greed for gold by a long list of 
men, who had been held in public esteem 
— some of them high in religious councils. 
It is a list to make a man sick at heart. 
Was the money worth the price ? How 
surely this passionate pursuit of wealth be- 
comes soul-absorbing, blinding the eyes, 
paralyzing the higher powers, blunting the 
sense of honor, a veritable disease and in- 
sanity, without compensating reward and 
without worthy goal ! And how almost 
certainly must children be sacrificed in the 
process! Unless wealth is subdued by 
higher ends as only a subordinate good, 
unless it is made means in very truth, it 
insures not enlarging but steadily lessening 
life ; we have been defeated by the peril of 
the lower attainment. 

Our whole age, as we have seen, has 
peculiar dangers at just this point, because 
of the very magnitude of its resources. 
Prodigious material prosperity is with us 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 23 

— and it is a good beyond doubt — pro- 
digious enough to blind and smother all. 
It is not strange that we are a little dizzy- 
headed. But its challenge is unmistakable. 
We cannot evade it. Can we stand it ? 
Or must we be drowned by it ? Can we 
save our lives ? Are we great enough, as 
a nation, to make the material, means only, 
to use it for high service ? If so, only 
ideals and enterprises great enough and 
spiritual enough to dominate these gigantic 
material interests can save us here. We 
have no choice. 

But the peril of the lesser good is not to 
be found in the pursuit of wealth alone. 
And in his record of the teaching of Jesus, 
Mark puts side by side with the perils of 
wealth, the perils of a false love, and thQ 
perils of a false ambition. For ''the great 
refusal" is nowhere refusal to refuse some- 
thing else, refusal to cut off, refusal to give 
up something of life — as the call of re- 
ligion is so commonly conceived. Rather, 
it is ''the great refusal" just because it 
is refusal of the highest good, the refusal 
of life, of service, of the greater glory. 
Subordinating the lower good is no end in 



24 RELIGION AS LIFE 

itself ; it is only the means to making the 
highest dominant. The method of Jesus, 
therefore, is nowhere a merely negative 
cutting off, but the method of life, of growth, 
of positive heroic achievement. 

In his teaching concerning divorce, thus, 
Jesus seeks to raise the whole conception of 
marriage to a higher plane. To him, 
marriage meant infinitely more than to the 
Pharisees, with their loose ideas of divorce ; 
more than to us Americans, with our 
shameful record here, also, of practical un- 
blushing trading in husbands and wives. 
I do not forget that this record of divorce 
bears witness at many points to a deepening 
sense of the respect due to a person. But 
still, I cannot doubt that we need, as a 
nation, to hear and to heed Charles Wag- 
ner's protest, — ''All of us have need to 
regain respect for love"; and Tennyson's 
indignant witness, — ''I would pluck my 
hand from a man even if he were my greatest 
hero, or dearest friend, if he wronged a 
woman or told her a lie"; and Ruskin's 
clear judgment, — ''Every virtue of the 
higher phases of manly character begins 
in this : in truth and modesty before 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 25 

the face of all maidens ; in truth and 
pity or truth and reverence to all woman- 
hood." 

Now it is quite true that any pleasurable 
emotion at the height of its intensity does 
seem for the moment to be its own excuse 
for being. It may often honestly seem 
justified forthwith, and be inclined to scout 
all other considerations in the powerful 
sweep of its passion. It can then say with 
mistaken pride, in the words of a poet of 
the day : 

Be thine that white engendered spark, 

And nought can feed it, nought can make it less. 

Virtue and vice, nobility and shame 

Are rags that drop away, while you sweep on 

Stripped as a flame, with arms about your star. 

No doubt there is a natural reaction of the 
soul, eager to test the full meaning of life, 
against the tame limitations of the conven- 
tional and prudential, that may often make 
one feel like saying with Walt Whitman : 

Oh for something pernicious and dread, 
Something far away from a puny and pious life, 
Something unproved, something in a trance, 
Something escaped from the anchorage and driving 
free. 



26 RELIGION AS LIFE 

But nevertheless, let not one lose the dis- 
tinction which belongs to him as man, of 
being able to think, to discriminate, to 
exercise his kingly power of self-control, 
and not be swept off his feet in any realm 
by mere tempest of feeling. This is indeed 
just what should distinguish the civilized 
man from the barbarian. The thoughtful 
man is likely to have a sense of disgust 
when the novelists begin to talk about the 
''red blood" of the hero, just when he is 
most disgracing himself ; as though it did 
not require far more grit to conquer passion 
than to yield to it. 

Now, what are this ''virtue and vice," 
this "nobility and shame," that are to 
"drop away like rags" as one yields to the 
onrush of passion ? They stand, it is well 
simply to remember, for the deepest dis- 
criminations that the human race in its 
development has been able to make. They 
concern the eternal loyalties upon which all 
conceivable decent society must be based. 
Love cannot be this heedless, utterly selfish, 
reckless, treacherous, and spoiled thing 
here represented, and be love at all, or 
remain love at its best, even for one, though 
that one be called a "star." 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 27 

If we are to come to the largest life in 
this realm, we need to come up to the high 
call of Christ's thought of marriage. And 
when he thought of marriage, he thought 
of an unselfish, reverent love, that made it 
forever impossible for a man to treat a 
wife as a thing, as property to be kept or 
bartered at will. He thought of a deep 
and sacred and lasting community of soul 
with soul. He thought of marriage as no 
mere compact of two individuals, dissoluble 
on any caprice, but as a solemn covenant 
with society and with God, fraught with 
interests precious beyond all estimate. And 
so he must say: ''What God hath joined 
together, let not man put asunder." Jesus 
does not chide men that they love too much, 
but that they love too little. His appeal 
is an appeal to rise to the possibilities of 
the most intimate of human relationships. 
He sees in marriage, physically based 
though it is, the possibility of a high friend- 
ship that can steadily transcend the physical 
and last beyond it. In effect he says : 
''Do not throw away the best and most 
sacred thing in your life for a passing desire. 
Do not make impossible the sweetest and 



28 RELIGION AS LIFE 

highest, that shall grow with yotir growth, 
deepening as your life deepens, a love be- 
yond all aging, of eternal quality, knit up 
indissolubly with all that is best in you.'* 
It is such a love that Airs. Browning has 
worthily conceived, and that one may dare 
to place beside the other conception of love 
as ineffably more significant and worthy 
and satisfying, a love of which a man has 
no need to be ashamed in any hour. 

How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways, 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 

My soiil can reach, when feeling out of sight 

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 

I love thee to the level of every day's 

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. 

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right ; 

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. 

I love thee with the passion put to use 

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 

With my lost saints — I love thee wdth the breath, 

Smiles, tears, of all my life ! — and, if God choose, 

I shall but love thee better after death. 

Here, too, is to be found the peril of the 
lower attainment — of "the great refusal," 
that cannot discern under the demand for 
seeming self-denial the call to larger life. 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 29 

How desperately have men sought here 
what they called freedom and found only 
slavery, and fought as slavery the highest 
freedom. 

And ambition, too, has its peril of the 
lower attainment. The two disciples who 
came seeking for themselves the chief places 
in Christ's kingdom, are met with his 
sobering, chilling challenge: ''Ye know 
not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink 
the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with 
the baptism that I am baptized with?" 
You are very ambitious. Is your ambition 
great enough ? Do you really aspire to 
sacrificial service ? They make, it is true, 
the highest prayer: ''Grant unto us that 
we may sit, one on thy right hand, and one 
on thy left hand, in thy glory." But they 
do not highly mean it. For they have no 
desire to share Christ's real glory. 

It is the picture of all ambitious self- 
seeking, always misconceiving true great- 
ness. We find it hard to rid ourselves of 
the notion that glory lies in conspicuousness, 
and is measured by large financial returns. 
We easily persuade ourselves that the more 
conspicuous and the better rewarded place 



30 RELIGION AS LIFE 

is the place of greater service. And yet 
so judging, one may have given up the 
larger service and taken the poorer op- 
portunity. He may have given up his own 
highest growth and consented to do the 
cheaper kind of work, thinner, less quicken- 
ing, dealing more with externals and or- 
ganization, and less with personal life, 
serving men in less vital ways, and giving 
less of his own best life. For the peril of 
ambition is like the peril of riches, every- 
where challenging you with the question 
in the midst of it. Can you save your life ? 
Can you keep deep the zest of work ? Can 
you keep unselfish love in yourself and 
others? Can you keep taking in great 
draughts of Hfe, knowing how to ''take time 
to be alone" and to ''be silent unto God" ? 
The peril of the driven, conspicuous life 
is great, for it is likely to find all too Httle 
leisure or desire to think, or to pray, or to 
live deeply, — to make sure that it has a 
worthy self to give. Can you stand it ? 
Can you maintain in it the highest service ? 
If God lays it on you, you must bow under 
it, and go htmibly forward in deep sense of 
the need of God. But "seekest thou 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 31 

great things for thyself? Seek them not/' 
Such places may give great opportunity, 
in the chance to bring about the control of 
great ideals in wider spheres. But they 
have this opportunity only for the man who 
can withstand the ''devastator of the day" 
— only for the man who is making steady, 
earnest fight for time to grow, to be his best 
self. For the only deliverance from the 
glamour and corrosive power of the selfish 
ambition is the still mightier power of the 
glory of unselfish ambitions, wide as the 
kingdom of God. And the peril here, too, 
to be feared above all, is ''the great re- 
fusal," the peril of the lower attainment, 
the danger that the meaner and smaller 
ambitions may thwart the greater. 

For he has dealt very superficially with 
the teaching of Jesus, who has failed to 
find in it, in the face, apparently, of certain 
and absolute defeat, the simple, calm in- 
sistence upon the sole omnipotence of self- 
sacrificing love as the law of life and the 
way to glory. It is his central, fundamental, 
revolutionary, distinctive principle, of which 
the plain historical results of his own cross 
and of even the very partial practice of his 



32 RELIGION AS LIFE 

teaching are the proof. The future belongs 
"to the Lamb that hath been slain." The 
spirit of self-giving is on the throne of the 
universe. But have men ever really taken 
it in ? Do we really believe that now and 
forever, for self and for others, for character 
and influence and happiness, for this world 
and for the next, the one great supreme 
condition of greatness, under a self-sacri- 
ficing God, is service, — self -giving ? Here 
lies the only Godlike life, the only way to 
glory. And we are just so far saved, we 
have just so far learned the lesson of life, 
we have just so far reached the end of our 
being, as we have learned the lesson of 
love — of self-sacrificing service. To turn 
from this is ''the great refusal " — the losing 
of one's life. 

Thus it is, that day after day, the 
thoughtful man feels like saying to those 
whom he most loves : I sum up all my desires 
for you in the single prayer, that you may 
be kept from the peril of the lesser good. 
I do not much fear that you will be swept 
into outbreaking evil ; I do fear that you 
will fall under the spell of the lesser goods. 
I am not anxious concerning your success 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 33 

as men count success ; I am anxious lest 
the smaller success jeopardize the greater. 
I do not expect you to prove arrant cowards ; 
but I dread for you that subtler cowardice 
that cannot choose largeness of life in the 
guise of self-denial. I would not keep you 
from all sorrow, if I could, for that were to 
shut you out of life itself ; but I would save 
you from the sorrow of high aspiration 
defeated by ''great possessions" — the deep 
and abiding sorrow of ''the great refusal." 
I could covet for you the vision of all life's 
values ; but though your eyes be holden 
to every lesser value, may they not fail 
to catch the vision of "the life that is life 
indeed." I expect from you great con- 
victions along many lines ; but underlying 
them all may there be the conviction of 
convictions, that if God is such a God at 
all as Jesus revealed, then plainly the hard 
test is always a call to life, the demand for 
service and sacrifice, always an invitation 
to share the life of God himself in his highest 
glory and blessedness. 

It is not too much to say of those who 
are entering active life to-day, that it is 
their privilege to come to it in a new period 



34 RELIGION AS LIFE 

of the world, when new standards are 
already set up. Under these new standards, 
they may count upon it, the tribute of 
greatness is increasingly certain to be denied 
to the man who has not mastered his own 
flesh, who has not mastered his possessions, 
who has not mastered his selfish ambitions. 
Steadily there is being pressed home upon 
men the imperative demand for reverent 
personal relations everywhere. Steadily is 
growing the conviction that the man whose 
income surpasses the service he renders is 
not to be envied, for he has not earned 
what he has, and an unearned ''special 
privilege" is not an honor but a disgrace. 
Steadily upon even the selfishly ambitious 
is borne in the persuasion that "whoso- 
ever would be first among you shall be 
servant of all." 

Within the lifetime of those entering 
active life to-day, it may be confidently 
expected that the same great powers that 
are now employed so largely in the building 
up of private fortunes and of selfish am- 
bitions, will be dedicated far more gener- 
ally to transcendent public service and to 
the world-wide interests of the coming 



THE CHOICE OF LIFE 35 

civilization of brotherly men. In the bring- 
ing on of that new and better time, when 
love and wealth and ambition shall take 
on their true honor, because they have 
risen to their highest possibilities, the true 
man must hope to have his share. 

We ask for life ; God answers with larger 
life. "He asked life of thee, thou gavest 
it him ; even length of days forever and 
ever." All real life begins with the choice 
of the larger life. 



II 

THE METHOD OF LIFE 
The Way into Life's Values 

If one has honestly faced the challenge 
of his existence, and is ready to make the 
decisive choice of life, in the preference 
ever for the larger life, the question still 
remains: How is one to come actually 
into this larger life ? What is the way 
into life's values ? What is life's method ? 

It is one of the chief ends of education 
to enable one to enter with conviction and 
appreciation into the great spheres of value ; 
into aesthetic and intellectual and spiritual 
ideals ; into the beautiful, the true, and 
the good : into music, and literature, and 
art ; into the scientific, the historical, and 
the philosophic spirit ; into the riches of 
friendship ; into moral and religious ideals. 
Now it is particularly suggestive that it 
may be said that the way into all these 
values of life is essentially the same way. 

36 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 37 

For to see that this is the case, brings to 
one anew the sense of the singular unity 
and simpHcity of Hfe, and helps one to dis- 
cern the great direction for significant 
living. 

One may approach the matter from 
several angles with a like result. First 
of all, the fact that the Master of the art 
of living conceives of his disciples as ''the 
salt of the earth," suggests at once the 
ruling method of life. His method is 
simplicity itself — keeping a few men in 
companionship with himself, until they 
catch his spirit and so become fitted in 
their turn to become centers of life for 
others. His words, — ''Ye are the salt of 
the earth : but if the salt have lost its 
savor, wherewith shall it be salted?" — 
assume two things : the method of the 
contagion of the good life ; the indispen- 
sableness of the integrity of the individual 
spirit. 

The words of Jesus find only an accurate 
modern echo in Herrmann's deep-going 
summary of the moral law: "Mental 
and spiritual fellowship among men, and 
mental and spiritual independence on the 



38 RELIGION AS LIFE 

part of the individual, that is what we can 
ourselves recognize to be prescribed to us 
by the moral law. Each of the two is a 
particular expression of what is morally 
good. We ought at every moment to make 
the rule of our conduct this : Thou shouldst 
throw thy whole being into the effort to 
attain the profoundest and most far-reach- 
ing fellowship with other men that is pos- 
sible ; and at the same time this also : 
Thou shouldst be inwardly independent, 
and in virtue of that truly alive. Both of 
these propositions go together. For only 
by willing what we ourselves recognize 
to be eternally the final aim of all things 
can we regard ourselves as independent 
beings, and so as free masters of the cir- 
cumstances in which our existence is placed. 
On the other hand, the mental and spiritual 
fellowship which we are obliged to con- 
ceive of as the final aim is possible only 
among independent beings. For whoever 
lacks inward independence has nothing in 
him that he can give to others. In that 
case he may indeed, as a thing, serve as a 
means employed by others. He renders 
this service even without taking any notice 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 39 

of it. He means to exploit others and is 
being exploited by others. Fellowship with 
them he can have none." 

The analogy of aesthetic appreciation, 
as we shall see, would bring us finally to 
the same two indispensable elements : fel- 
lowship and honesty. The method of 
modern science, too, is essentially identical. 
For all scientific progress involves the co- 
operation of scientific workers, but requires 
at the same time, if this cooperation is to 
be of any value, honest independence on 
the part of each worker. We can be very 
sure that we are, therefore, coming here 
close to the secret of life in all its ranges. 
The method of life is the method of fellow- 
ship and of utter inner integrity. 

In the first place, one is not prepared 
to come into any of the great values of life 
without dealing honestly with himself in 
the sphere in which he seeks achievement, 
whether the values are those of music, or 
art, or literature, or of scientific or philo- 
sophical appreciation, or of friendship, or of 
moral and religious ideals. In every case, 
any element of pretense is a positive hin- 
drance. The value of all possible fellowship 



40 RELIGION AS LIFE 

depends on such honesty, such integrity 
of spirit. For that my fellowship with 
another who has preceded me in the ap- 
preciation of aesthetic or spiritual values 
should be of worth to me at all, on his part 
there must be honest testimony concerning 
what he has himself found, and on my part 
there must be no pretense of sharing what 
I have not yet come to share. One cannot 
build solidly on sham anywhere, and pre- 
tense in one's own original experience or 
in one's testimony concerning his experience 
alike prevents real growth. 

If I am to reach, for example, genuine 
musical appreciation of my own, I may not 
allow myself idly to echo others' opinions 
that either grow out of insights that I do 
not have, or bear witness to experiences I 
have not yet attained. We are all tempted 
to take our values more or less second- 
hand, because we shrink from both the 
intellectual effort and the inner honesty 
required to get them first-hand. Mental 
and moral laziness is an immense hindrance. 
The discerning musical critic has much to 
give us, if we will use honestly what he 
brings. But he will only hinder our own 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 41 

growth in musical appreciation, if he does 
not bring us to a point where we can see 
for ourselves and feel for ourselves some- 
thing at least of what he points out. When 
one of my friends, more honest than most, 
reached in his travels the Sistine Chapel 
at Rome, to take in, if he might, the glories 
of Michael Angelo's ceiling frescoes, he had 
to admit a great sense of disappointment. 
But he did not hastily conclude that the 
fault was all Michael Angelo's ; and, on 
the other hand, he was not willing simply 
with sham enthusiasm to catch up the 
opinions of the critics. While he availed 
himself, therefore, of the help of the best 
authorities, he insisted on coming back 
day after day until he could feel that he 
himself had come into some honest ap- 
preciation of his own of the beauty and 
majesty of the figures and ideas there 
portrayed. 

The same law holds even more clearly 
in the realm of scientific appreciation. It 
is the very essence of the scientific spirit 
that one should see straight, should report 
exactly, should give an absolutely honest 
reaction upon the situation in which he 



42 RELIGION AS LIFE 

finds himself. Without this complete hon- 
esty there is no scientific facing of the facts 
at all. And it is, I suppose, just this utter 
integrity of the inner spirit that Jesus has 
in mind when he says, "If the salt have lost 
its saltness, wherewith shall it be salted ?" 

Insight in any sphere, that is, must be 
genuinely our own or nothing is accom- 
plished. Insight, appreciation, conviction, 
decision, ideal, hope — all these have no 
meaning at all if they are simply words 
caught up from another, and have not 
become realities in our own experience. 
The one thing that life cannot stand any- 
where is sham. And where one consents 
in any measure to pretense at any point in 
the supposed pursuit of life, he has really 
abandoned the method of life and involved 
himself in inevitable self-contradiction. 

And as there must be honesty in the 
original experience, so too there must be 
a like honesty, as has been already sug- 
gested, in all testimony to one's experience. 
There must be no careless handing on, in 
any of the realms of life, of what we have 
not ourselves verified. The literary or 
art or musical critic, the scientist, the 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 43 

friend, the moral or spiritual prophet, who 
speaks, as out of his own insight, what he 
has only caught up from another, is him- 
self a fraud, and cannot help another into 
reality of life. The whole history of human 
thought, however, illustrates how often 
it has happened that men have taken up 
without verification the opinion of some 
supposed authority, to hand it on, some- 
times for generations, to have it finally 
challenged by some honest soul and proved 
utterly without foundation. 

Modern thought confirms, thus, in many 
ways, Jesus' conception of unreality as a 
root peril in every realm of life. And Jesus 
has no words so scorching as those which he 
aims at hypocrisy, fundamental falseness. 
Certain great notes of reality, therefore, 
come out repeatedly in the teaching of 
Jesus. 

First of all, Jesus builds — as he must if 
true to man's nature — directly on the 
principle of the unity of the inner life. 
He knows that the whole life of a man 
tends inevitably and persistently to unity, 
to logical consistency ; that any attitude 
persisted in tends to permeate the entire 



44 RELIGION AS LIFE 

spirit of the life, for good or for evil, as the 
case may be. ''If thine eye be single, thy 
whole body shall be full of light," he says, 
''but if thine eye be evil, thy whole body 
shall be full of darkness ; if, therefore, the 
light that is in thee be darkness, how great 
is the darkness." The false, the selfish, the 
prejudiced taint manifested at any point, 
affects the whole life. And just as surely, 
the true, the loving, the candid spirit any- 
where shown helps everywhere. It is amaz- 
ing how surely and immediately this unity 
of the spirit makes itself felt. 

This conviction of the necessary unity of 
the inner life carries with it at once, it 
will be seen, the demand for reality every- 
where, — for utter integrity, even in the in- 
most man. Just because the life is one, 
and cannot possibly be divided off into 
mutually exclusive compartments, the spirit 
must be sound at every point, with no 
slightest trace of falseness. Jesus must, 
therefore, say, "If thy right hand cause 
thee to stumble, cut it off." "Salt is good ; 
but if the salt have lost its saltness, where- 
with will ye season it ? Have salt in 
yourselves." 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 45 

But if there is to be reality everywhere, 
with no taint of sham at any point, the 
truth that I declare must be really my own 
truth. I must have chosen it and yielded 
to it. The principle necessarily involves, 
thus, mental and spiritual independence on 
the part of the individual — not in the sense 
of conceited denial of the indispensable need 
of the mental and spiritual fellowship with 
others, but in the sense that convictions 
and decisions and ideals and hopes that are 
effectively to count in my life, must be 
genuinely my own — in some true sense 
my own achievement. One must see for 
himself, and choose for himself. Truth 
that is vital he must himself have earned. 

Jesus is constantly seeking, therefore, to 
bring men to insights, convictions, and 
decisions of their own ; to real experience 
out of which they can themselves authori- 
tatively speak. He would not have them 
echo unthinkingly even his own convictions. 
The spiritual life, in the nature of the case, 
must be purely inward. And therefore he 
challenges them, ''And why, even of your- 
selves, judge ye not what is right ?" ''He 
that hath ears to hear, let him hear." 



46 RELIGION AS LIFE 

His message, consequently, must be 
always one not of external authority, but of 
the authority of that inner conviction that 
comes from direct appeal to the reason and 
conscience of men. This, I suppose, is the 
reason why his teaching is so largely simply 
a series of insights with inevitable appeal. 
How many of his sayings are of this sort : 
''Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do 
good or to do harm ? to save life or to 
kill?" ''Is the lamp brought to be put 
under a bushel or under a bed, and not to 
be put on the stand ? " "With what meas- 
ure ye mete it shall be measured unto you." 
"If the blind guide the blind, both shall fall 
into a pit." 

These, then, are insistent notes in the 
teaching of Jesus, and necessarily involved 
in one another : the essential im.ity of the 
spiritual life, utter inner integrity, mental 
and spiritual independence on the part of 
the individual, the necessary inwardness of 
all spirituality, the direct appeal to reason 
and conscience. 

But we are never to forget that for Jesus 
these demands are no mere demands as to 
the form of life, but as to its essential con- 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 47 

tent. His application of the principle of 
the unity of life is that danger impends if 
the virus of the faithless and selfish life 
enters at any point. The inner integrity 
which he demands is the integrity of a 
love genuine through and through, with no 
least germ of treachery. The mental and 
spiritual independence which he seeks from 
his disciples is that they should come for 
themselves into his great unshaken con- 
victions of the infinite love of the Father, 
and the possibility of the life of a like self- 
forgetful love for every man. Such a life 
must have its deep inner root, though it 
will have manifold outward expressions. 
And Jesus believes so fully in the omnip- 
otence of the love of the Father, that he 
knows that his message of that love must 
find echo in the heart of every son of man. 
Now these notes of reality in the teaching 
of Jesus themselves suggest the way that 
one must take into reality in the religious 
life. In the first place, it is as if he said : 
Settle it with yourselves that the one thing 
that you want is truth, to know the will of 
God. And this single high determination 
to know and to do the will of God is the 



48 RELIGION AS LIFE 

greatest possible help in finding the truth, 
in finding that will of God. The man who 
is saying after Jesus, ''I am come, not to do 
mine own will, but the will of him that 
sent me," and who holds persistently to 
that purpose, cannot wish to deceive him- 
self, to manipulate the evidence, to take 
the prejudiced view. As his one desire 
is to find the truth, he will welcome every 
ray of light from whatever source, and being 
utterly true himself, is on the certain way 
to truth and reality in his religious life. 

For the earnest man cannot fail to see 
also that Jesus is here virtually saying to 
his disciples. If you would get that real 
sharing in the life of God in which anything 
that can be called religion must consist, 
do not begin to juggle with your reason 
and conscience. Do not twist the evidence. 
That is to smother the light, to corrupt 
the eye. Do not allow the beginning of 
prejudice. Do not be a sophist with your 
own soul, blinding your own eyes with 
smooth persuasions that at bottom you 
know are false. Do not hunt for excuses 
for doing what you know you ought not 
to do. As you value your soul's life and 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 49 

all that is worth while in life, keep the ab- 
solutely open mind, the single eye ; be 
utterly true to your own best vision. For 
no man can set any limit to that to which he 
may come, if he begins by juggling with his 
reason and conscience. 

Jesus' whole uncompromising war upon 
the Pharisaic spirit shows how constant in 
him is the passion for reality. He perfectly 
exemplifies, in the realm of the moral and 
spiritual, that of which we think to-day as 
the very essence of the scientific spirit at 
its best. For he is here insisting with his 
disciples, in the third place, that it must 
be the habitual purpose of their life, as we 
have said of the scientific spirit, to see 
straight, to report exactly, to react with 
absolute honesty upon the situation in 
which they are placed. Less than this at 
any point means that one will be both 
misled himself, and will mislead others. 
The utterly honest reaction is the one 
necessity for one's own growth, and it is 
at the same time the one great service that 
a man can render to his fellow men. And 
few men need so much this passion for 
reality, this habitual honesty, as the 



50 RELIGION AS LIFE 

teachers of youth. They are bhnd guides 
guiding the bhnd, unless, with Jesus, the 
very habit of their souls is thus to see 
straight, to report exactly, to react with 
absolute honesty. 

And once more, the man who is in dead 
earnest to come into reality in religion, will 
find help in making sure that he sees things 
in proportion. One of the chief ends of 
education is the production of the thought- 
ful man ; and the thoughtful man is the 
man who sees things in true proportion — 
who sees life steadily and sees it whole. 
It was the distorted vision of the Pharisees 
that accounted for so many of their char- 
acteristics. This it was that made it 
possible for them to substitute the negative 
for the positive, neutrality and indifference 
for commitment and enthusiastic devotion, 
the empty for the filled, the sign for the 
reality, the external marvel for the inner 
appeal, the outer observance for the inner 
spirit, the petty for the great, rules for 
principles. Now, however necessary any 
or all of the things for which the Pharisees 
contended might be, it must still be plain 
to the man who sees things in proportion 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 51 

that they are all but of the smallest con- 
cern, compared with the greatness of the 
interests that they replaced. Against this 
distorted vision Jesus must protest, if he 
is to be true either to his own soul, or to the 
God whom he revealed, or to the men whom 
he loved. 

Jesus cries out in all this for some real 
seed of life, no mere show of it, or form of it, 
or rule to guard it, but for life itself, abound- 
ing life — not respectable deadness. And 
he felt sure that he who would have this 
seed of life, real participation in his own 
spirit, genuine sharing in God's life of love, 
must be vigilantly on his guard against 
these manifestations of the blinded soul. 

Why, now, is Christ so insistent upon 
the integrity of the inner spirit ? In the 
first place, just because the whole progress 
of the kingdom of righteousness depends 
upon the absolute soundness of the indi- 
vidual life. Jesus must be insistent here. 
Dead seed will give no harvest. 

Moreover, he felt the deadening effect 
of many tendencies of his own time, and 
he must save his disciples from that trend 
toward externalism, toward conventionality, 



52 RELIGION AS LIFE 

and toward mere authoritv, which so char- 
acterized his age. And like tendencies 
continue to work in every generation. 
The man who would be real, who would be 
awake, who would be himself, must resist 
dail}^ the pressure of authority, of the ex- 
ternal, of the conventional. We need the 
sharp, unsparing criticisms of the most 
ruthless prickers of bubbles, like Xietsche 
and Ibsen and Shaw ; not. once more, that 
we may follow them blindly, but that we 
may be sure that we have not substituted 
the mere conventions of custom for genuine 
moral insights and enthusiasms. Inner in- 
tegrity and individual, independent in- 
sight and conviction, — upon these de- 
pends the moral health of the world. 
Ever>n:hing is here at stake, and the en- 
vironment threatens. 

But the peril of failure at this point has 
a still further reason. The paradoxical 
demands of the moral life themselves make 
failure easy. 

Conscience demands both mental and 
spiritual fellowship, and mental and spirit- 
ual independence. Just because we need 
others so much and so decisively, it is easy 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 53 

to surrender all independence and initiative 
of our own, easy to forget that truth is 
not truth until it has been earned. Just 
because we must modestly admit that we 
constantly require the witness of others who 
have preceded us in the experience of values, 
it is easy to allow ourselves simply to repeat 
their confessions after them, instead of 
compelling ourselves to see for ourselves 
as they saw for themselves. In another's 
words, ''Religious tradition is indispensable 
for us. But it helps us only if it leads us 
on to listen to what God says to ourselves. " 
''We all need moral help from others, but 
not the substitution of a ready-made list 
of duties for the results of our own think- 
ing." 

So, too, just because the inner spirit 
must have its external embodiment, some 
form of outward expression, if it is actually 
to work in the world at all ; just because 
the external is, in this, indispensable, it is 
all too easy to insist upon the external, and 
be careless whether it is — what it must 
be if it is to be of any value — the inevitable 
manifestation of an inner life. W6 may make 
glass flowers so cunningly devised that we 



54 RELIGION AS LIFE 

can hardly tell them from the real blossom, 
but there is no life in them, no least evi- 
dence of an unfolding life. 

So, too, just because one cannot bring 
in light without dispelling darkness, just 
because one cannot bring into the soul great 
causes and great enthusiasms without 
thereby casting out the evil, and even the 
petty; just because all positive enthusiasms 
involve in themselves certain negations, it 
is easy to mistake the negations and the 
subsidiary means for ends in themselves, 
and make negation the goal of life, and be 
content with the empty soul. The petty 
then replaces the great; "the hedge" of 
the law, the great ends of justice and mercy 
and faith. Emptiness is substituted for 
the engrossing enterprises of the kingdom 
of righteousness. 

Thus, in varying forms, the paradoxical 
claims of the moral life themselves make it 
easy to fail at the vital point. For in any 
one of these ways there may insidiously 
come in the creeping paralysis of inner 
futility and falseness. It is because of this 
constant peril of failure at the center of 
life that Jesus is here so insistent. I sup- 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 55 

pose that Jesus' insistence means that, if 
he were to address the graduates of our 
colleges to-day, the questions that would 
seem to him vital are such as these : Have 
you any vision of your own ? Have you 
moral and spiritual insights that mean 
anything to you? Have you God-given 
convictions wrought into the very fiber 
of your own life ? Have you any message 
that is yours, and that you feel that you 
must utter ? Have you any indignations 
and enthusiasms that shake you to the 
center of your being ? If your college 
education has left you without these ; or, 
worse still, if it has robbed you of them and 
left you sophisticated and blase, having 
mistaken moral and religious indifference 
for tolerance, and lack of conviction for 
breadth, then may God forgive you and 
the college, for no other can. 

But side by side with this indispensable 
inner integrity, the method of life requires 
as equally fundamental, fellowship. Hon- 
esty is not inconsistent with modesty. It 
rather requires the open mind. For while 
one insists on that complete honesty that 
does not allow him to catch up, without 



56 RELIGION AS LIFE 

interpreting experience, the opinions of 
another, there should obviously be at the 
same time the modest perception that one 
has probably not exhausted in his own ex- 
perience the meaning of any of the great 
values. And he may well expect, therefore, 
if he goes honestly forward, to share in- 
creasingly in the larger insights of those 
who have lived most in these spheres of 
value. Just as in the realm of the aesthetic 
and of the scientific and of the philosophical 
we cherish just such expectations, so in the 
realm of the moral and religious we have a 
right to hope for much more in the line of 
the experience of those who have given here 
most time and thought. We need their 
testimony, their leading ; we may well 
clearly recognize it, and keep toward them 
the open mind. We wish to share in the 
deeper convictions of the great souls every- 
where, but we wish really to share and not 
to have fellowship in name only. 

The fact is that the rule in all the realms 
of life is that we are commonly introduced 
through the testimony of some other who 
has preceded us in appreciation of the value 
we are seeking. We are bom into a world 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 57 

in which many are already living in these 
values. Our insights here cannot, in the 
nature of the case, all be fresh discoveries of 
our own. The constant and immensely 
effective factor of imitation in human re- 
lationships makes it certain that we cannot, 
if we would, avoid this introduction into 
the great values. And he would doom him- 
self to a poverty-stricken life indeed, who 
should attempt the folly of discovering all 
values for himself. Is it not the very busi- 
ness of the literary or art critic, of the 
teacher, of the scientific worker, of the 
friend, and of the religious leader to share 
with us their own best ? Just because 
'*art is long and time is fleeting," we may 
not hope that all the insights into which 
we come are to be discoveries of our own. 
And it is commonly through this introduc- 
tion of some other that all the values have 
come to us. The books, the pictures, the 
interests, the friends, the moral and spirit- 
ual ideals which we have in our inner pos- 
session, have largely come to us at the 
beginning through the testimony of others. 
That this should be the rule in religion also 
is therefore quite to be expected. It is 



S8 RELIGION AS LIFE 

natural, then, that Professor Bosworth 
should be able to say that the program of 
Christianity is the conquest of the world 
by a campaign of testimony through em- 
powered witnesses. And it is no accident 
that in the Gospel of John, side by side with 
the great words Light, and Life, and Love, 
there is another — Witness. 

The fellowship that life requires is always 
a double fellowship. For there are just 
two services of supreme value that one 
man can render another : he can lay upon 
that other the impress of a high and noble 
character by being the kind of man he 
ought to be ; and he can share with the 
other his own best vision — that by which 
he himself most lives. Beyond this there 
is nothing of supreme worth that one can 
bring into another's life. And this method 
of the contagion of the good life, in the 
sharing of its spirit and of its vision, is 
ever3rwhere the method of life. 

Jesus has used various illustrations to 
make clear his sense of the only way in 
which society can be brought to its true 
goal. Only men can save men. The good 
life is the salt that must preserve the earth 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 59 

sound. It is the light that must enHghten 
the world's darkness. It is the leaven that 
must permeate every element of the lump 
of society. It is the seed of life that must 
grow and reproduce itself. The kingdom 
of love can be established only through the 
loving life. It cannot be legislated into 
existence. It cannot be created out of 
hand. Life comes only from life. This 
is the theory and method of Jesus, and it 
does seem, at first sight, hopelessly simple 
and ridiculously inadequate. 

And yet the method of the contagion of 
the good life is a hopeful method. It is 
with great hope in his heart that Jesus 
sets himself, thus, through the divine touch 
of his own life, to create out of the little 
circle about him this life-giving seed and 
nucleus of the world's civilization. For 
he has matchless faith in the contagion of 
the good, in its capacity for growth. If 
one would have a figure of what may be 
expected from the single good life hidden 
in society's mass, let him look, he says, at 
the million-fold growth of a single grain of 
mustard seed ; such is the promise of the 
good seed of the Kingdom, divinely quick- 



6o RELIGION AS LIFE 

ened. The hidden forces of the universe 

— the power of Almighty God — are in 
the seed. The good hfe is the hfe that 
seeks the ends of God, and he who seeks 
the ends of God may count upon the power 
of God. Surely the Kingdom of God is 
like a grain of mustard seed ; we may 
believe and hope endlessly. Salt will pre- 
serve, light will enlighten, leaven will work, 
life will grow. The good life is inevitably 
and mightily contagious. We may count 
upon it for every germ of good in ourselves, 
in those we love, in the world. We are to 
keep high our hope. 

Nevertheless, men scout the forces that 
Jesus counted alone sufficient, as hope- 
lessly feeble. The power of a loving life 

— how little, they have said, can it do ! 
And through the generations, they have 
brought, for example, the whole enginery 
of the state to bear, with force and violence 
and pimishment, upon the criminal, only to 
drive him further into crime. While claim- 
ing the name of Christ, they have scorn- 
fully abjured the methods of Christ as 
weakly sentimental and ineffective. It is 
against this infidelity of professedly Chris- 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 6i 

tian states, against the unspeakable folly 
of refusing to use the only omnipotent 
forces, that Tolstoy has justly cried out. 
And it is the greatest glory of our own time, 
that in it are found men, who are slowly 
regaining the faith of Jesus in the omnip- 
otence of the humble, believing, loving life. 
Judge Lindsey's marvelous Juvenile Court 
record is a plain translation into a piece 
of modern life, of Christ's own method of the 
contagion of the loving life. And the 
increasing adoption of the ''big brother" 
method in Juvenile Courts is only an ex- 
hibition of the same spirit. It is no cheap 
and easy method. But open-minded humil- 
ity and trust and patient self-giving love are 
proving the only really effective forces for the 
conquest of evil. The method of the con- 
tagion of the loving life is a hopeful method. 
The simplicity of Christ's method im- 
plies, further, that ultimately it is the in- 
evitable method ; that the only thing, 
finally, that any man has to give is him- 
self — the contagion of his own spirit. 
If that self is significant and worthy, so is 
his service. If the self is worthless, so is 
all attempted service. No machinery, no 



62 RELIGION AS LIFE 

device, no externals of any kind, no magic, 
no miracle, can get worthful service out of a 
worthless self. Neither education nor re- 
ligion can furnish a way by which one may 
trick the laws of life. Acute lawyers may 
find loop-holes in human legislation, but 
there is no way of tricking the laws of 
God. There is no possible manipulation 
by which life can be gotten from death, 
truth from falsity, genuineness from sham. 

Both the critics and the defenders of 
educational methods, therefore, are quite 
certain to exaggerate. There is, no doubt, 
a choice in methods. But the one final 
method back of all subsidiary methods is the 
contact of life with life. Ultimately the 
one indispensable thing is a man of char- 
acter and judgment, and the honest re- 
sponse of honest souls to such a soul. 
Granted that, the most faulty methods 
cannot wholly fail. Lacking that, the most 
scientific pedagogy will not suffice. The 
method of the contagion of the good life 
is the inevitable method. Finally we are 
shut up to that. 

This method of Jesus, too, is a positive 
method. Jesus cares for no goodness that 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 67, 

is merely negative. The only goodness he 
knows is the goodness of a positive, minister- 
ing, self-forgetting, self-giving love. It is 
the very business of salt to season, of light 
to enlighten, of yeast to leaven, of the seed 
to die to itself and live again in far larger 
life. The stupidity of shutting any one of 
these up to itself, of depriving them of their 
very reason for being, is, in Jesus* thought, 
exactly the stupidity of the righteousness 
that exhausts itself in separation of itself 
from evil, in shutting out the possibility of 
contamination. As surely as the salt is to 
season the savorless, and as light is to en- 
lighten darkness, so is goodness to penetrate 
the world with its own spirit and throw it- 
self with abandon into the life of the world 
for the world's saving. The method of 
love is perforce the method of fellowship. 
It may not withdraw itself from association 
with men without losing its own identity. 
The disciple of Christ, therefore, knows 
that it is self-contradiction to talk of saving 
oneself in forgetfulness of others. The 
righteousness of the Kingdom is the right- 
eousness of high and positive and loving 
conquest, the carrying through of great 



i ,(" 



64 RELIGION AS LIFE 

enterprises of good for men. Goodness, in 
Christ's thought, is not only not uninterest- 
ing, it is the one most interesting of all 
things. The disciple of the righteous life, 
therefore, feels the express obligation and the 
high privilege of mental and spiritual fellow- 
ship, of constantly multiplying and deepen- 
ing relations with men. 

The method of the contagion of the good 
life is a positive, aggressive method. It is 
j\ hopeful, inevitable, positive. 

But all the values of literature, and music, 
and art, of science and philosophy, of 
friendship, and of moral and religious ideals, 
are after all but a partial revelation of the 
riches of some personality, and our one great 
road, therefore, into life in all realms 
is this road of personal association with the 
richest, the largest, the best lives. The 
greater and the more significant the values 
we are seeking, the more do we need to share 
the visions of many concerning them, and 
these, the best. It must be peculiarly 
true for the religious man, with his search 
for fellowship with the Infinite, that he 
needs imperatively the supplementary 
visions of all the greatest souls. 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 65 

The one all-inclusive counsel, therefore, 
as I have elsewhere said, for attainment in 
all of the spheres of value is this : Stay 
persistently in the presence of the best in 
the sphere in which you seek achievement, 
with honest response ; the rest will largely 
take care of itself. Hear persistently the 
best in music, and only the best ; one need 
not be anxious under those circumstances 
concerning his musical taste ; it will steadily 
refine, and his judgment become more and 
more accurate. See persistently the best 
and only the best in art ; once again, the 
reaction on one's own artistic judgment is 
practically certain. Read persistently the 
best in literature ; the poor stuff will fall 
off of itself, and one will come instinctively 
to prefer that which deserves his approval. 
Share persistently in the insights and 
methods of the ablest workers in science, 
and history and philosophy ; no one can 
then cheat you of real participation of your 
own in the historical, the scientific, or the 
philosophical spirit. Stay persistently in 
the presence of the best in character, in 
moral and religious ideal ; the richest re- 
sults that life has to offer are then insured 



66 RELIGION AS LIFE 

to you. This is precisely the principle 
which Paul enjoins when he writes : ''What- 
soever things are true, whatsoever things 
are honorable, whatsoever things are just, 
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever 
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of 
good report ; if there be any virtue, and if 
there be any praise, think on these things." 
It is well that we should make it per- 
petually clear to ourselves that, when, in 
any of the realms of value, we give the 
best, opportunity with us, we are really 
sharing in the personal revelation of some 
personal life. The supreme law of life is 
this law of personal association, in which we 
give time and thought and attention to the 
wealth of those personalities that have most 
to give. There is no cheaper road to the 
best in any realm. Life knows no less 
costly method than this persistent associa- 
tion with those to whom we can look in 
admiration and love, and who are ready to 
share unstintedly with us the best that 
they have themselves achieved. And we 
can count with certainty on the effects of 
this law of personal association. No one, 
perhaps, has put more impressively than 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 67 

George Eliot this need of the incarnate 
ideal, in a passage that I have often quoted : 
''Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun- 
filled eyes cannot discern them — they pass 
athwart us in their vapor, and cannot make 
themselves felt. But sometimes they are 
made flesh ; they breathe upon us with warm 
breath, they touch us with soft responsive 
hands, they look at us with sad sincere 
eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; 
they are clothed in a living human soul, 
with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. 
Then their presence is a power, then they 
shake us like a passion, and we are drawn 
after them with gentle compulsion, as flame 
is drawn to flame." 

This law of association means, further, 
that just as we require from those whose 
testimony concerning any of the great values 
is to count with us, that they shall them- 
selves have undoubted conviction, character 
and judgment that we can trust, manifest 
disinterestedness, and the power to make 
their witness real and rational and vital ; 
so for us also, who in our turn are to help 
others into the great values of life, there 
is need of these same qualities of effective 



68 RELIGION AS LIFE 

testimony. And there is no way to these 
very quaHties so sure as this same way of 
persistent association with those who have 
achieved most in these reahns of value. 

Moreover, if in all these realms we are 
dealing not with vain imaginations, but 
with reality, we can be sure that the great 
law of personal association means also, 
that we have no need in any realm to pre- 
tend, or to put pressure upon our minds 
to reach a certain attitude or position. 
We have one obligation only, and that is 
simply to let the great facts and values 
make their own legitimate impression. The 
great values do not need that we should 
force our minds to faith in them ; they need 
only opportunity and honest response. 
And if the best does not attract us, we 
have not so much judged it, as been judged 
by it. 

It is true that different kinds of values 
make a different kind of appeal to the 
htiman personality. What an "honest re- 
sponse" means, therefore, varies somewhat 
with the realm of value concerned. But 
an honest response to any value requires 
some element of activity on our part, 



THE METHOD OF LIFE 69 

either the activity of intellectual appre- 
hension, or of warm aesthetic appreciation, 
or of earnest ethical commitment of will. 
And where character and moral or religious 
ideal are involved, it is plain that the ap- 
peal is made to the whole man to a degree 
that does not hold of the lesser values. 
Here, then, it is not enough that we should 
respond simply with intellectual apprehen- 
sion or with aesthetic admiration ; here we 
must make answer with commitment of 
will and the loyal response of our whole 
being. The ethical and religious challenge 
us to decision that cannot be gainsaid : 
Will you or won't you have it so ? 

But just because all the great values of 
life go back to the revelation of the riches 
of some great personality, our plain life- 
task, as Kaftan used to say at the Uni- 
versity of Berlin, is to enter with conviction 
and appreciation into the understanding 
of the great personalities of history. Herr- 
mann has already been quoted as saying : 
** We ought at every moment to make the 
rule of our conduct this : Thou shouldst 
throw thy whole being into the effort to 
attain the profoundest and most far-reach- 



70 RELIGION AS LIFE 

ing fellowship with other men that is pos- 
sible." And this, both for giving and for 
receiving. For the strengthening of our 
own life, and so for greater power to give, 
we peculiarly need the fellowship of the 
best lives. Our. great life-task, therefore, 
may be truly said to be, to come into some 
rewarding fellowship with the great souls 
of htiman history; with the great artists, 
and discoverers, and seers, and heroes, and 
saints, culminating in the matchless life of 
Jesus, until we reflect, however imperfectly, 
something of their character and of their 
vision of beauty, and truth, and God. 
"The prophet," Professor James says, "has 
drunk more deeply than any one of the cup 
of bitterness, but his countenance is so un- 
shaken and he speaks such mighty words of 
cheer, that his will becomes our will, and 
our life is kindled at his own." 

The method of life is the method of 
mental and spiritual fellowship, as well as 
the method of mental and spiritual in- 
dependence, — the contagion of the good 
life. Men are to be salt, and the salt must 
not have lost its saltness. 



Ill 

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 
Facing the Facts of Life 

We have seen that the method of Hfe 
includes, as indispensable, utter honesty, 
open-minded facing of the facts, and honest 
reaction upon them. And the really honest 
man must be willing to face all the facts, 
— not only the facts that lie upon the sur- 
face, but the facts of the whole man ; the 
less obvious but deeper realities ; the facts 
that underlie man's whole ideal struggle. 
What would that mean to the thoughtful 
man ? 

I suppose there are few things that the 
real man or woman hates more than simply 
to mark time — to go through the motions 
of things without getting anywhere. And 
surely, if there is any place where, above 
all, the real man does not wish to mark time, 
it must be in the region of his moral and 
spiritual life. It seems, therefore, pecul- 

71 



72 RELIGION AS LIFE 

iarly worth while, at times, to call up into 
clear consciousness those silent assump- 
tions that underlie all earnest moral and 
religious endeavor. Beneath all such in- 
dividual effort, beneath all the activities 
and services of the Church, beneath all the 
labor of Christian education, beneath all 
the ideal enterprises of the race, there lies, 
first of all, the clear assumption that the 
supreme interests are those of character ; 
that, as Thomas Arnold used to say to the 
boys at Rugby, whence have gone out so 
many of the leaders of English political life, 
*'The only thing of moment in life or in 
man is character" ; or, as another has put 
it, ''The great soul will be strong to live, 
as well as to think." To have failed here, 
is fundamental failure, whether for the in- 
dividual or the civilization. For, as Eucken 
says, ''every culture that does not treat 
the ethical task, in the widest sense, as the 
most important of tasks, and the one that 
decides all, sinks inevitably to a mere sem- 
blance of culture, a half culture, indeed a 
comedy." 

But this assumption, which underlies 
all effort to attain noble living, implies 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 73 

another : that convictions and decisions 
and ideals and hopes are needed, ^^or 
character does not spring up out of vacancy. 
It roots in certain great convictions ; it 
expresses itself in certain great decisions ; 
it is guided by certain great ideals ; and 
it is inspired by certain great hopes. And 
the only thing that justifies the agencies 
Ipf morals and religion, and all our efforts 
and our studies and our plans is that out 
of them, somehow, we expect that there 
shall come some producing, some deepening, 
some maintaining at least, of convictions, 
decisions, ideals, and hopes. Unless some- 
thing of that is attained, we merely go 
through the motions of things ; we mark 
time ; we do not achieve. 

But this assimiption, in turn, involves 
another, that time and thought and atten- 
tion are necessary. For no man can come 
by mere drifting into significant convictions 
and decisions and ideals and hopes. They 
necessarily imply that we have stood, with 
time and thought and attention, in the 
presence of the abiding truths — of the 
majestic facts that make for character and 
for reality in the spiritual life, and given 



74 RELIGION AS LIFE 

them opportunity with us. Every thought- 
ful appeal to men, every service of the 
Church and every agency of the Church, 
and every ideal claim go back ultimately 
' to this assumption, that men need to give 
time and thought and attention, if the 
things of the spirit are to have for them the 
grip of reality. In the long run, we may 
not forget, the world of the spirit is likely 
to be real to us, in just about the propor- 
tion in which we allow it to become real 
by earnest honest attention. 

There is still one more of these silent 
assimiptions of all the ideal activities : 
that these questions of the moral and 
spiritual life, as we have already seen, are 
always individual questions. No man may 
act in another's place. A decision is no 
decision, if it be not the man's own. Truth 
that is truth must be earned. Faith, a great 
philosopher urges, is a deed. One's father 
may bequeath to one his fortune, but he 
cannot bequeath his convictions. One's 
mother may give to one some precious 
heirloom ; she cannot give, much as she 
might desire to do so, her ideals or her 
decisions. Convictions and ideals and de- 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 75 

cisions are essentially individual, and they 
must be continually reaffirmed even for 
the same individual from time to time, and 
still more for every generation. One is 
reminded of that great picture of Raphael's, 
''The School at Athens," with the little 
group of students gathered about a geo- 
metrical demonstration on the floor. One 
pupil is manifestly following the teacher 
with full appreciation, evidently getting 
his own insight. Another pupil, not quite 
catching the point, looks up with inquiry 
at the one bending over him to find whether 
he sees. Now it is no help to the second 
pupil that the first sees ; it would be no 
help to him to find that the third saw. He 
must himself see, if the truth of the demon- 
stration is to be his at all. In like manner, 
in the whole realm of the moral and spirit- 
ual life, if we are to see at all, we must 
see for ourselves. "Faith is a deed." 

But if the supreme interests are those of 
character ; if, therefore, convictions and 
decisions and ideals and hopes are requisite ; 
if to this end, time and thought and atten- 
tion are necessary ; and if these questions 
of the spiritual life are inevitably individual 



76 RELIGION AS LIFE 

questions — that no other can meet in 
our place — then, the very determination 
not to mark time in the spiritual life, must 
carry us infallibly into a steady honest 
facing of the facts of life — the outstanding 
realities of the moral and religious life. 
For convictions, decisions, ideals, and hopes 
can arise within us only by honest reaction 
upon the facts. 

This age has been, in singular degree, 
an age of intellectual revolution. And yet 
there remain, in spite of this enormous in- 
tellectual revolution, certain great, com- 
mon, human facts that are just the same, 
and that give abiding significance to human 
life. These do not vary with the trappings 
of civilization. Human nature remains. 
Otir true life lies not primarily in relation; 
to things, but in relation to persons. The 
outstanding realities, then, that it most 
concerns us all steadily and honestly to 
face, are those great common facts that 
belong alike and equally to all of us simply 
as human beings. They abide through all 
intellectual changes. They are essentially 
the same to-day as they were centuries ago, 
and shall be the same centuries hence ; 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 77 

the same for the West as for the East ; 
the same everywhere. 

The question, then, that chiefly concerns 
the sotil in earnest pursuit of Hf e is this : 
Am I wilHng to face the facts of life, or am 
I ignoring them — the great, common, 
essential human facts ? I cannot forget 
that my own old college president used to 
remind us that the essence of unbelief was 
not denial of the truth, but refusal to treat 
the truth as true. That is all. We are 
not measured by the truths that we deny, 
but by the truths that, recognizing, we 
still are practically ignoring. That is, 
therefore, a momentous sentence that lies 
so near the beginning of Coleridge's Aids to 
Reflection: ''Truths, of all others the most^ 
awful and interesting, are too often regarded 
as so true, that they lose all the power of . 
truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory- 
of the soul, side by side with the most 
despised and exploded errors." Our real 
inner creed is not that list of propositions, 
short or long, that we might be persuaded 
to write out some day in our libraries, but \ 
that much shorter list that we are ready, i 
steadily, day after day, to put into our life.] 



78 RELIGION AS LIFE 

That is our real inner creed. But as 

Gladstone long ago said : ' ' Many men 

know their opinions, few their convictions ; 

but in the long run convictions rule, opin- 

/>4ons go to the wall." And convictions come^ 

: only from honest reaction on the facts. It 

^is a matter of supreme moment, then, that 

a man should not ignore the fundamental 

facts of his own being and life. 

Here, the man who means to show utter 
inner integrity, must be willing squarely to 
face, not only the facts that lie on the sur- 
face of his life, but those less obvious but 
deep-going facts that underlie man's entire ^ 
endeavor for the accomplishment of ideal 
aims. 

> First of all, the honest man cannot allow 
himself to ignore (the laws of life, involved 
in his very nature. That is a very signif- 
icant definition of education which Huxley 
gives : ' ' Education is the instruction of 
! the intellect in the laws of nature — under 
which name I include not merely things 
and their forces, but men and their ways ; 
and the fashioning of the affections and the 
will into an earnest and loving desire to 
move in harmony with those laws." Now, 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 79 

it is of the very essence of the moral life 
\^that a man should thus come to know and 
obey the laws of life. And the thoughtful 
facing of the facts of life surely includes 
just this readiness to see and obey these 
laws that are involved in man*s very nature. 
Now religion must look upon these laws of 
fundamental htiman nature as laws of God, j 
the creator of that nature, and as, therefore, 
laws of enlarging life, to be taken on not 
reluctantly, but with joyful eagerness, as a 
\M part of the will of the loving God. The 
\ ethical and religious come here inevitably 
together. To refuse to recognize these 
facts of the immanent laws of our beings, 
is to run away from life altogether. 

One may approach the matter from a 
slightly different angle, when he recognizes, 
as among those facts that underlie man's 
whole ideal struggle, the fact that ;the sense 
of beauty, the sense of truth, and the sense 
of duty belong to normal htmian endow- 
ment. Men have differed widely enough 
in their judgments as to what is beautiful, 
as to what is true, as to what is duty ; but 
that a creature had no sense of beauty or 
truth or duty would seem to us equivalent 



8o RELIGION AS LIFE 

to asserting that the human plane had not 
been reached at aU. That is, we simply 
cannot question man's ideal endowment. 
At the lowest, he is inevitably more than a 
mere creature of the senses. He cannot 
find all his life only in the change of raw 
sensations. Man shall not live by bread 
alone. To refuse to face this fact insures 
inner discord, — makes it certain that one 
must live at cross purposes with himself. 
What would it not mean, on the other hand, 
honestly to take account of this fact, that 
in the fundamental structure of one's being, 
one is made forever to seek truth, to fulfill 
duty, to reach out not only for the appre- 
hension, but for the embodiment, of some 
real beauty of life ? 

To face these more basic facts of human 
nature would mean also to ask the question, 
How deep -going is religious faith ? how 
essential is it to normal himianity ? And 
one can hardly follow to the end that in- 
quiry without seeing, as I have elsewhere 
pointed out,^ that a faith essentially re- 
ligious, logically underlies all our reason- 
ing, all work worth doing, all strenuous 

^ Personal and Ideal Elements in Education, pp. 90-98. 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 8i 

moral endeavor, all earnest social ser- 
vice. I do not repeat the argiiment here; 
but even so absolutely fundamental is 
religion, that we must affirm and reaffirm 
it implicitly in every act of our lives. For 
in every one of the realms named we are 
constantly obliged virtually to assert the 
possibility of a goal that assumes a larger 
reason and plan and purpose than can be 
given by finite beings. We seem quite 
unable otherwise to bring into our lives 
unity or meaning or harmony or permanent 
value. If we may not assert the essential 
certainty of religious faith, we seem doomed 
only to fruitless agony of thought, every- 
where baffled of its goal. And then it is 
useless to talk about the possibility of 
rational thinking at all. Are we facing 
this basic faith, involved in our very natures, 
and building consistently upon it ? In the 
background of all the rest of life, thus, lies 
the mighty all-inclusive fact of God and of 
the possibility of living relation to him. 
If we have any access to ultimate reality 
at all, then, the thoughtful man will not 
need to feel that he must manufacture a 
religion for himself or for others. He 



82 RELIGION AS LIFE 

knows men's need of God, and he believes 
that the fact of God is so great a fact, that 
it will verify itself to those who will give it 
access to mind and life. Nevertheless, this 
supreme, all-inclusive fact of God and of 
the possibility of relation to him is not 
the fact first reached, and is not to be 
taken as a matter of course for men. 
Rather is it, as has been implied, the out- 
come of fidelity to many other facts, that 
themselves silently assume at each step the 
reality of God. 

But when one speaks of honest adjust- 
ment to the facts of life, he must think not 
only of these deeper underlying prerequisites 
of all human endeavor, which we have been 
considering, but also of those common out- 
standing spiritual realities of the daily 
life of men. 

Of these daily facts there is, to begin 
with, the fact of [our double nature:) that 
we have that in us which links us with the 
animal downward, and that in us which 
links us not less certainly with God upward. 
No man who means to live the life that he 
ought to live can leave that fact out of 
accotmt. We are not to be spared the fight, 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE Ss 

which that fact involves. Whatever one 
beHeves about evolution, he cannot doubt 
in his own experience the fact of the inner 
conflict between flesh and spirit. And 
neither for himself, nor for those whom most 
he loves, may the earnest man forget this 
fact or think the fight quickly over. There 
is a paradox involved, for the goal is not 
ascetic, and the sense good is a real good. 
And yet the struggle cannot be evaded. 
The fact of man's double nature, moreover, 
concerns not youth alone ; for the sensuality 
of the older man, though more cold-blooded, 
may be even more deadly and deadening 
than the hot passion of youth. And there 
is a subtler sensuality that is hardly rec- 
ognized as such at all. We are all tempted, 
under the pressure of our present material 
civilization, to allow in some form or other 
the material aspect of things to dominate 
the ideal, to make the sense world really 
supreme. But it is still as true as when 
the words were first written, that all of us 
have need to guard ourselves against the 
''lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, 
and the vainglory of life.'* It was not for 
nothing that one of the world's best fighters 



84 RELIGION AS LIFE 

said of himself: ''I buffet my body and 
bring it into bondage : lest by any means, 
after that I have preached to others, I 
myself should be rejected." ''I therefore 
so run," he says, ''as not uncertainly; 
so fight I, as not beating the air." When 
does a man really face the fact of his double 
nature ? Not until he is making it sure 
that he is living his life on such a plan that 
the hold of the animal on him is steadily 
weakening, and the hold of the Godlike 
on him is steadily strengthening. 

Side by side with this fact of our double 
nature is the fact of; the fateful gift of will.) 
We can choose with God, we can choose 
against God, and this choice can be made 
by no other. It is no merely metaphysical 
question which is thus raised. Whatever 
one's philosophical formulation of the per- 
ennial question of freedom and necessity, 
no one doubts that men have much to do 
with the shaping of their own characters. 
It was one of the least sentimental of our 
poets who compared this fateful fact of 
will with that other fact, that men often 
think so solemn — the fact of death, to 
remind us that this is still more solemn : 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 85 

Men think it is an awful sight, 

To see a soul just set adrift, 
On that drear voyage from whose night 

The ominous shadows never lift ; 
But 'tis more awful to behold 

A helpless infant, newly bom. 
Whose little hands unconscious hold 

The keys of darkness and of mom. 

And he goes on to make the man who has 
come down to an unworthy end say : 

Mine held them once ; I flung away 

Those keys that might have open set 
The golden sluices of the day. 

But clutch the keys of darkness yet ; 
I hear the reapers singing go 

Into God's harvest. I who might 
With them have chosen, here below. 

Grope shuddering at the gates of night. 

What would it be rationally, squarely, 
honestly, to face this fateful gift of will ? 
Not less, one must think, than this : that 
one should make it certain, once more, that 
he is living his life on such a plan as to in- 
sure that the righteous will is gaining in 
steadiness, in breadth of application, in 
depth of application, and in skill and tact 
and delicacy of application. It ought to be 
true, that is, as the years pass over our 



86 RELIGION AS LIFE 

heads, that we should find it more and more 
second nature steadily to do that which we 
believe we ought to do. There should be 
less feeble vacillation of will. It ought 
to be true, with our widening knowledge, 
that we should now be awake to whole 
spheres of human life in which we have ob- 
ligations, to which we used to be blind. 
It ought to be true as a man deepens the 
meaning of life for himself in his own ex- 
perience, that there should deepen at the 
same time a sense of his obligation to his 
fellow men. And it ought to be true as 
he comes into a sense of what fine, reverent, 
personal relations mean, that he should be 
capable now of a tact and skill and delicacy 
that his youth could not know. 

With the fact of wil , the honest man 
must recognize, also, the fact of responsi- 
bility, — that we are members one of 
another. For this is of the very essence 
of the moral imi verse. This conviction 
should peculiarly characterize this age, 
that glories in its claim to be called the age 
of the social consciousness. For if we have 
become convinced that economically, 
socially, and politically we are members 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 87 

one of another, we can hardly fail to draw 
the certain inference that we are not less 
members one of another in the highest 
ranges of our lives. And no man belongs 
truly to the age of the social consciousness 
who does not recognize the fact of this 
mutual responsibility as not alone inevit- 
able, but as desirable and indispensable ; 
who would be willing if he could, to have 
his life cut off from these rich relations to 
other lives. The man who refuses to face 
this fact of responsibility, who can say of 
himself — ''I do not care to influence any- 
body," needs to be reminded that the in- 
evitable relations of his life make it certain 
that he cannot go up or down alone ; that 
he has no choice as to whether he shall 
influence others ; he can only choose what 
kind of influence he shall exert. Steadily, 
hour in, hour out, day in, day out, we are 
all tending to bring to our level, with the 
whole power of whatever personality we 
have, those about us, pulling them down to 
our level, or raising them up to it, as the 
case may be. We are inextricably members 
one of another. 

And how powerful a motive this inevitable 



RELIGION AS LIFE 



connection of one's life with others' lives 
may be, William Canton suggests in the 
poem addressed to his little daughter, in 
which he compares her influence to the 
power of the angels. 

God's angels, dear, have six great wings, 

Of silver and of gold. 
Two round their heads ; two round their hearts ; 

Two round their feet they fold. 

The angel of a man I know, 

Has just two hands — so small ! 
Yet they're more strong than six gold wings 

To keep him from a fall. 

In his own darkest and weakest hours, when 
it seems to him that he does not care at all 
for himself, let a man use with himself this 
powerful motive ; let him make it clear 
to himself that it is utterly impossible for 
him to go down alone or to go up alone. 
One cannot fail and not make the fight 
harder for every other life that is touched 
by his ; and one cannot conquer and not 
help thereby every one of these related 
lives. The moral and religious life of one 
city of one of our great central states re- 
ceived a deadly thrust, because two men 
widely known and greatly trusted proved 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 89 

utterly false. On the other hand, it is our 
great privilege, by simple fidelity of life, 
to make another's fight less bitter, to make 
it easier for him to believe in truth and 
honor and purity and God. We are mem- 
bers one of another. 

The earnest man cannot fail to face, also, 
the fact of men's capacity for indefinite 
growth. Breathing through the whole life 
of the earnest man, there is to be the con- 
viction, that'there came a time in the history 
of the world, when there was introduced 
a creature in whom psychical changes 
meant more than physical ; a being once 
for all made capable of endless progress in 
knowledge, in power, in character. Brown- 
ing has emphasized for all this generation 
that it is the great single characteristic 
of man that he is a growing creature, and 
that to that growth no limits can be set. 
A man is turning his back, therefore, upon 
his destiny as a man, unless he is making 
sure that he is laying foundations broad 
and strong for endless development. He 
must lay claim here to his destiny as a 
man, and make sure of the glory of life 
through certain and steady growth. For 



90 RELIGION AS LIFE 

the opportunity of this endless progress for 
man lays upon him at once the universal 
obligation of growth. He owes a steadily 
developing life to himself, to his friends, 
to the world, to God. He owes it to him- 
self to plan for persistent growth. In 
the words of President Jordan, "Your 
first duty in life is toward your after-self. 
So live that your after-self — the man you 
ought to be — may in his time be possible 
and actual." Only through such a growing 
self, too, can he meet the obligation he 
owes to his friends, to the world, or to God. 
No one can claim, therefore, to be facing 
squarely and honestly this momentous fact 
of his capacity for indefinite progress, unless 
he is making certain of constant develop- 
ment. In the last analysis, as one has so 
often to see, we none of us have anything 
to give but ourselves, and those selves 
must be steadily richer and more signifi- 
cant. It may well stir in any man an 
endless ambition, that he is made on so 
large and divine a plan that to his growth 
no limits can be set. One large element, 
too, of a man's courage in his work must be, 
that he recognizes that he works for others, 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 91 

also, who are capable of this same endless 
progress into likeness to God, and therefore 
for those who are abundantly worthy of 
the faithful exercise of every power he has, 
and of all needed sacrifice. 

But if the honest man is to recognize, 
on the one hand, as undoubted, this capac- 
ity of men for endless growth, he cannot 
shut his eyes, on the other, to the equally 
certain fact of sin, which our modern 
novels and the daily paper, as well as the 
ancient religious literatures of the world, 
are forced to admit as an abiding fact. It 
is quite as imperative that one should not 
forget that sin is a growing fact, as well, in 
a man's life, unless he is steadfastly setting 
his face in the right direction. With his 
faith in God, and his faith in man's capacity 
for endless progress, the man who is to 
throw himself with earnestness into the 
struggle of the race for character and spirit- 
ual achievement, has to recognize the fact 
of sin with absolute honesty but not with 
discouragement. The optimism of Jesus 
is no blind and shallow optimism. It is 
able to take into account the darkest facts. 
Nor can the honest man deny in his own 



92 RELIGION AS LIFE 

experience the fact of sin. He knows how 
often he has seen far better than he has done. 
And the unfulfilled vision is his unanswered 
accuser. He needs to be vigilantly watch- 
ful, therefore, not so much against the 
onsets of over^^helming attacks, as against 
that subtle, gradual, deadly deterioration 
that damns himself and damns those for 
whom he would labor. One need not fear 
for those whom most he loves, that they 
shall suddenly, under some tempest of 
temptation, be swept over the precipice 
of outrageous wickedness. That practi- 
cally never happens. Long before the 
gross defiance of righteousness arrived, the 
battle was lost within, the inner guard had 
been broken down ; the man had failed in 
the inner citadel. In confronting frankly 
the fact of sin, therefore, our chief fear 
must be of that subtle and gradual deteriora- 
tion that sets in and goes on almost uncon- 
sciously to the man, until it eats out the 
very heart of his life. This is the lesson of 
that terrible book of Harold Frederic, The 
Damnation of Theroji Ware. For the dam- 
nation of Theron Ware, the young minister, 
was that he had laid down his inner guard, 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 93 

and had started so gradually upon the 
down plane, that he could still think of 
himself as sleek and prosperous, while in 
fact he was false and hollow and corrupt. 
No one is honestly facing, then, the fact 
of sin, unless he is making it certain that he 
is living his life on such a plan, as insures 
that, so far as in him lies, sin shall be for 
him and for all those committed to him, a 
steadily lessening, not a growing, fact. 

Moreover, it is given us to set side by side 
with this dark fact of sin, the endless, 
glorious miracle of unselfish himian love. 
Let a man give this fact its full weight. 
In spite of pettiness, and falseness, and 
selfishness, what a wealth of human love 
the world contains ! No man can have 
seen even a little of love's marvelous ca- 
pacity for joyful sacrifice, and feel that he 
can have deserved such a love. At its 
best, this unselfish human love is a rebuke 
of our own smallness and a challenge to a 
nobler self-giving, and at the same time a 
great ground of faith in the Love back of 
the universe. What can more surely steady 
a man's faith in God, and strengthen the 
desire for some share in his eternal self- 



94 RELIGION AS LIFE 

giving, than this perpetual witness of daily 
human love ? 

Among the outstanding realities of life, 
also, there cannot be left out of account, 
for the man who means to face the facts, 
the fact of death. One ma}^ quite sympa- 
thize with his generation in the feehng, 
that the best preparation for death is to 
think upon living, not upon dying ; 
and yet in his more thoughtful moments 
be compelled to confess that the reaction 
from the older point of view has gone quite 
too far, if it has come to mean that the 
thoughtful man is to leave quite out of 
accoimt that one inevitable experience that 
comes to all. The thoughtful man can- 
not wish to go like a dumb brute into the 
experience of death. Rather will he prefer 
to say with Browning : 

I woiild hate that Death bandaged my eyes and 

forebore 
And bade me creep past. 

He will wish with open eye and mind to 
face that inevitable experience of death, 
to get out of it all that God has in it for 
him. That will mean that he will need to 
forecast the memories that will be his in 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 95 

that hour; that he will need to anticipate 
how life is going to appear to him as he 
looks back over it from its end, and to ask 
himself whether that backward vision is 
going to show that in the years of his life 
he has seen things in anything like their 
true proportion. In that retrospect will 
the manifestly greater interests of life loom 
large, or be seen to have played an insig- 
nificant part in the earthly years ? The 
thoughtful man must wish to make sure, 
too, who his visitants are going to be in this 
experience of the closing of the earthly life. 
And it is a part of his business as one who 
lives not for himself alone, to secure not 
only for himself, but, so far as it lies in his 
power, for all those whom his life touches, 
that the faces that front them in the final 
hour shall be friendly faces, and that no 
soul committed in any way to him shall 
have then to say : 

There my dead Youth doth wring its hands, 
And there, with eyes that goad me yet, 

The ghost of my Ideal stands. 

God bends from out the deep and says : 

"I gave thee the great gift of life ; 

Wast thou not called in many ways ? 

Are not my earth and heaven at strife ? " 



96 



RELIGION AS LIFE 



Oh, glorious Youth, that once was mine ! 

Oh, high Ideal ! all in vain 
Ye enter at this ruined shrine 

Whence worship ne'er shall rise again. 
The bat and owl inhabit here ; 

The snake nests in the altar-stone ; 
The sacred vessels molder near, 

The image of the God is gone. 

The fact of death leads, thus, at once to 
the fact of accountability to God for life 
intrusted. One may set aside as simply 
pictorial, if he will, the Biblical representa-' 
tions of a great single solemn assize ; still, 
so far as I can see, the essential fact of ac- 
countability forever abides. I did not 
bestow my nature on myself, and I cannot 
deny, therefore, the trust of that peculiar 
individuality that has come into my hands. 
For that individuality I am accountable. 
I cannot resist the sense of calling, of divine 
vocation so involved. These plain facts of 
my nature themselves make me feel that, 
in some high sense, I am ''sent" into the 
world. And in this calling of my own in- 
dividuality, I catch some glimpse, at least, 
of a Good Power back of all, to whom I 
must return account of my stewardship 
of this unique personality, not self-be- 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 97 

stowed. For if there be any rationality in 
the universe at all, then the life into which 
we go must be the logical and inevitable out- 
come of the life lived here. In this sense, 
at least, some judgment must always be 
passed upon the life, and accountability 
must always stand. In its essence, there- 
fore, it remains as true to-day as when 
Paul wrote it, ''So then every one of us 
shall give account of himself to God.'' 
When one faces, then, with any real thought- 
fulness the mysterious trust of life, and the 
sobering challenge of his divinely given 
individuality, it cannot seem to him strange 
that a great American statesman should 
have affirmed, that the most solemn thought 
that ever occupied his mind was the thought 
of his personal accountability to God. 
For we are not animals, who can live con- 
tent on the sense plane. ''A spark dis- 
turbs our clod"; and when we would 
quench it, our own self -contempt seems 
but the prophecy of a still diviner judgment. 
The fact of accountability implies, in 
turn, the fact of the future life. We can- 
not be overwise concerning it, however 
thoughtfully we have studied all that we 



98 RELIGION AS LIFE 

can know about it. There are mani- 
festly many interesting and curious ques- 
tions concerning it, to which no answer has 
been returned. There is plainly much here 
that we cannot know. And yet there is not 
only the assurance of the insight of Jesus 
and of the whole spirit and atmosphere of 
his life for the reality of the future life ; 
but the further fact that many of the most 
thoughtful in all generations have felt the 
imperative need of the future life to give 
any adequate meaning to this life. And, 
moreover, so tremendous is the bare possi- 
bility of the future life, that, rationally, 
we can only build as though it were going 
to be. But if there be any future life at 
all, there is one thing concerning it that 
we may know : every man must live it out 
with himself, and he will wish to make 
certain that he is going to be decent com- 
pany for himself. He will wish so honestly 
and wisely to face the endless future, as to 
make sure that he has laid such foundations 
here, that the self with which he is to spend 
the eternal years is to be good company — 
a self rich and interesting, inspiring and 
noble. The very meaning of the earthly 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 99 

life must be that men are here to learn to 
live ; that here and now they are to live a 
growing, steadily deepening and enriching 
life, and so lay indeed foundations deep and 
broad for that endless growth of the future 
life. The great rewarding factors of the 
future life, too, as of the present life, must 
inevitably be in personal associations and 
significant work. But how much either 
work or personal associations can mean to a 
man, must depend on the quality of the self 
which he brings to them. 

There is still one more fact that the man, 
who means to live in any degree for others 
besides himself, may not forget : the fact 
of his need of help for other men. No 
thinking man can face the sin and suffering 
and ignorance and weakness of men, the 
cramping, deadening conditions in which 
many lives are lived, and not see that he 
has no need so great as the need of being 
able to give adequate help to the inner life 
of other men, — to open to them the abiding 
springs of being. Have we any message of 
life quite large enough and deep enough to 
fill the need of men ? Have we ever made 
it real to ourselves that somewhere down the 



loo RELIGION AS LIFE 

years, time and again, we shall find our- 
selves face to face with souls at a crisis ; 
souls desperately in need ? It will not 
always look so on the outside. No ob- 
server may be able to tell of the inner 
struggle, or of the despairing appeal that 
is made to us. The common things will 
seem to go on. But here and there, there 
will be given to us a glimpse into the depths 
of another life, and we shall a little under- 
stand how great the need is. And if that 
other is some one for whom we greatly care 
— a son, a daughter, or nearest friend — 
how sternly must come home to us our 
spiritual destitution ! If for us, then, our 
great convictions are all in the past, our 
great decisions unrenewed, our ideals 
dimmed, and our hopes buried, what can 
be otir word of help ? Here again every 
thoughtful man must be driven back to 
God, to the sources of life, to make sure 
that there his own life has been refreshed, 
enriched, and deepened, so that he may now 
speak out of his own experience and with 
convincing authority of the "good news of 
God." There is one prayer that the ear- 
nest soul, who wishes to live in any degree 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE loi 

outside himself, it would seem, must be 
perpetually offering to God : Lord, speak 
to me, and then speak through me. For 
it is perfectly certain that we cannot bring 
home to another soul with the grip of con- 
viction, a truth that has not first of all 
gripped us, and God must first have spoken 
to us that he may speak through us. 

In this search for adequate help for other 
men in sorrow and sin and desperate need, 
the thoughtful man will find himself coming 
back of necessity again and again into the 
presence of the great prophetic souls as 
the most important facts of human history. 
Here are facts never to be ignored. Here 
are insight and courage and faith and love. 
Here is deep experience of the spiritual 
world. Here is assured relation to God. 
Nothing else conceivable can throw such 
light on the meaning of life and the nature 
of God, as the great personalities of his- 
tory. And the greatest have never been 
satisfied on the sense plane. They bear 
witness to ideal aims, and disclose a faith 
in something greater than themselves. 
Even when the immediate ends of their 
religious struggle are mistaken ends, as 



I02 RELIGION AS LIFE 

in the long history of asceticism, they still 
testify to the reality of the unseen and 
eternal. Are we taking these transcendent 
facts of the great prophetic personalities 
of the race fairly into account, and giving 
them their due weight ? 

In the line of these preeminent, prophetic 
personalities of the race, stands transcendent 
the figure of Jesus. If persons must always 
be for us the most significant facts of his- 
tory, Jesus cannot fail to be history's 
supreme fact, — a fact that deepens every 
other fact of life. At the end of every in- 
quiry one finds his majestic figure looming 
up, shedding light where else were darkness, 
and hope and joy where else were despair. 
For, setting aside every theological prop- 
osition, here at least in Jesus, as judged 
by the highest standards that men are able 
to apply, is the best life that the earth 
has seen, the surest word of the God of all 
being. Here, as proved out of the expe- 
rience of the centuries, are the world's best 
ideals, the best insight into the laws of life, 
the best dynamic for Hfe. Because here 
are embodied the greatest convictions and 
the highest hopes. The least inference, it 



THE REALITIES OF LIFE 103 

would seem, that the thoughtful man may- 
draw, either for himself or for others, is 
that no man can pretend to be in dead 
earnest in the attainment of character for 
himself or of the message of help for other 
men, who is not putting himself steadily 
and intimately into touch with that central 
life, to take on as of second nature Christ's 
thoughts and feelings and purposes ; to 
allow him to be to him all that he can. 
Not until then will a man have proved 
himself in earnest either for himself or for 
others. 

And through this transcendent fact of 
Christ the thoughtful man looks out with 
other eyes upon all the other facts of life. 
Through him he sees the heart of God. 
Seen in the light of the great personality of 
Jesus, he can face with cheer and courage 
and mighty hope in his heart all these other 
fateful facts of life : those deep underlying 
prerequisites of all human endeavor — 
the laws of our natures, man's sense of 
beauty and truth and duty, and the in- 
evitableness of religious faith ; and those 
other outstanding spiritual realities of the 
daily life — the fact of man's double nature, 



104 



RELIGION AS LIFE 



of the gift of will, of the inevitable way in 
which he is bound up in the bundle of life 
with all other lives, the fact of man's capac- 
ity for indefinite growth in knowledge and 
power and character and fellowship with 
the living God, the dark fact of sin, the 
irradiating fact of human love, the inevitable 
fact of death, the fact of accountability, 
and of the future life, and of the need of 
help for other men. It was something 
like this, I suppose, that was in the mind of 
Browning when he makes the aged John 
say: 

Then stand before that fact, that Life, and Death ; 
Stay there at gaze, till it dispart, disspread, 
As though a star should open out, all sides, 
Grow the world on you, as it is my world. 

These facts — these abiding, common 
human facts — need no exaggeration. 
They need only to be squarely faced. 
Whatever other changes may take place, 
their truth makes life endlessly significant. 



IV 

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 

The Abiding Significance of the Bible, 
AND OF Jesus 

We have already seen that the method 
of Hfe includes as indispensable, honesty 
and fellowship. The demand for such 
utter honesty compels a frank facing of 
the realities of life, just reviewed. And the 
greatest of even these realities were found 
to be personal lives. The method of fellow- 
ship, too, impels us to seek rewarding per- 
sonal associations. We have also seen 
that the two supreme services that any man 
can render to another are, to lay upon him 
the impress of a high and noble character 
by being the kind of man he ought to be, 
and to share with that other the sources 
of his own life. This means, of course, 
that the greatest needs of us all are the con- 
tagion of high and significant personalities, 
and the opportunity of sharing in their best 



io6 RELIGION AS LIFE 

visions. It is on these two lines that we 
are driven so surely, even in this twentieth 
century, to find the great sources of our 
moral and religious lives in the Bible, and 
in its supreme personality, Jesus. 

First of all, is it mere tradition that 
sends us back to the Bible in the search for 
spiritual life ? Or is there here a real sur- 
vival of the fittest ? If a man's greatest 
discovery, next to the discovery of God, is 
the discovery of himself, and if the complete 
discovery of himself in all his spiritual 
possibilities involves the discovery of God, 
we may perhaps get a new light on the 
significance of the Bible for our spiritual 
life if we think of it as an aid to self-dis- 
covery.^ 

Has the Bible any preeminent place 
in bringing the man of the twentieth cen- 
tury to such deeper self -discovery ? Es- 
pecially can it help him to that highest 
self-knowledge that implies conscious rela- 
tion with God ? If so, it must be because 
in preeminent degree it makes available a 

^ Use is here made of a portion of an address by the 
author, contained in the transactions of the ReHgious 
Education Association. 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 107 

wealth of complex experience, puts us in 
direct contact with the most significant 
personal lives, and challenges our every 
power even more by the depth than by the 
breadth of its appeal. 

It is worth noting, from the beginning, 
that the question has been already tested 
for us in history. As a simple matter of 
fact, it was the Christianity of the Bible 
that awoke men to real self-consciousness 
and made forever impossible the simple, 
satisfied attitude of antiquity toward life 
and the world, and compelled the bringing 
in of the modern romantic spirit. As 
another has said, for us modern men ''the 
fever of man's conflict has passed across*' 
the face of nature ; ''the shadow of human- 
ity falls wide, darkening the world's play- 
ground." In the words of a great philos- 
opher, ''Christianity had demolished this 
calm self-sufficingness of the secular world" 
in which the ancient rested. "There began 
then to be developed for the first time that 
personal consciousness which thenceforward, 
with all its problems — freedom of the will 
and predestination, guilt and responsibility, 
resurrection and immortality — has given 



io8 RELIGION AS LIFE 

a totally different coloring to the whole 
background of man's mental life," and 
which no modern can wholly escape. The 
Greek artist, compared with the modern 
man, Kedney has said, ''was asleep and 
wrapt in the lovely visions of the En- 
chanted Ground, as though there were no 
cavernous depths and fearful declivities, 
no river of death beyond." To the same 
intent, Paulsen makes ''the longing for 
the transcendent" one of the truths which 
*' Christianity has engraven upon the hearts 
of men." "Antiquity," he adds, "was 
satisfied with the earth ; the modem era 
has never been wholly free from the feeling 
that the given reality is inadequate." 

Now, the book whose influence has been 
thus powerful enough to draw the dividing 
line of demarcation between the ancient 
and the modem worlds, and to awaken the 
modem man to that which is most char- 
acteristic in his consciousness, can hardly 
fail of preeminent power in bringing the 
individual to any deep discovery of him- 
self. It cannot be spared by the most 
modem of men. 

No man, certainly, is likely to come to 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 109 

full self-knowledge independently of those 
influences which have streamed forth from 
the Bible. It both suggests the laws of our 
life and tests our powers in too concrete 
and telling a fashion, to be wisely ignored. 

In the first place, the Bible is a most 
deeply and broadly human book, and so 
furnishes that appeal of complex experience 
so necessary to full self-consciousness. It 
touches unerringly the whole gamut of the 
deeper human emotions and aspirations, 
and embodies them in figures that mankind 
will not willingly let die. The experience 
of the race increasingly confirms the testi- 
mony of Lotze, who says even of the Old 
Testament, that ''for the most faithful 
delineation of the ever-recurring funda- 
mental characteristics of human life . . . 
the Hebrew histories and hymns are im- 
perishable models." And he adds, con- 
cerning this universal human appeal of the 
Scripture : ''The treasures of classic culture 
are open to but few, but from that eastern 
fountain countless multitudes of men have 
for centuries gone on drawing ennobling 
consolation in misery, judicious doctrines 
of practical wisdom, and warm enthusiasm 



no RELIGION AS LIFE 

for all that is exalted." A book with such 
breadth of appeal cannot fail to stir to 
larger self-consciousness any man who will 
face its phenomena with attention. 

Moreover, it is of vital importance as 
an aid to self -disco very, that the Bible 
should be in such rare degree a personal 
book ; for persons are chiefly stirred by 
persons. And the Bible is so instinct 
with life, that it is hardly possible to put 
the point of a needle into it anywhere with- 
out drawing blood. It brings us face to 
face with what must be counted, I judge, 
— when estimated as to its value for the 
highest life of men, — the most significant 
line of personalities which history anywhere 
presents. And it is the great glory of the 
historical and critical study of these later 
years, that it enables us to see these pro- 
phetic men as living personalities, facing 
precise problems in a strong developing 
career. So the free critic Cornill can say of 
Amos : ^' Amos is one of the most marvelous 
and incomprehensible figures in the history 
of the human mind, the pioneer of a process 
of evolution from which a new epoch of 
humanity dates." And Hosea he counts 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE iii 

''among the greatest religious geniuses 
which the world has ever produced"; 
and he says of Isaiah : ''In Isaiah we find 
for the first time a clearly grasped con- 
ception of universal history." It is into 
the presence of such personalities that the 
modern historical study of the Bible in- 
troduces us. They become for us warm 
realities, and touch us as never before 
with the inspiration of a personal life in 
which God works. And nothing so stirs 
and fructifies our own life, nothing so brings 
us to glad sense of our own higher possibili- 
ties, as even this partial but appreciative 
and responsive sharing in the visions of the 
higher man. Like children, we grow best 
by trying to measure up to things beyond 
our present capacity. And this splendid 
vision of another — moral or religious — 
which we have partly shared, haunts us 
perpetually, until we have tried to make it 
our own in deed as well as in thought. We 
come to a new self -consciousness. Can 
the most modern of men afford to miss the 
contagion of this line of spiritual seers ? 

For it is only true to say, on the one hand, 
even of the Old Testament, that it is the 



112 RELIGION AS LIFE 

one great moral book of antiquity. As I 
have elsewhere said, ''it is not a mere col- 
lection of moral aphorisms, but shows the 
developing moral sense everywhere, in every- 
thing. Character is really the supreme 
interest in this book. Among all the an- 
cient peoples, in truth, only the Jews have 
the modern sense of sin, and the Bible is in 
this particular the only ancient book with a 
really modem tone. Compared with these 
sober Jews, even the gifted Greeks are but 
playing children in their sense of sin and 
character. This clear and constantly de- 
veloping ethical tone marks out the Bible 
distinctly from all other ancient books." 

And when one passes to the New Testa- 
ment, this powerful ethical impression is 
only increased. One may well say with 
Sabatier : ' * What other book like this can 
awaken dumb or sleeping consciences, re- 
veal the secret needs of the soul, sharpen 
the thorn of sin and press its cruel point 
upon us, tear away our delusions, humiliate 
our pride, and disturb our false serenity ? 
What sudden lightnings it shoots into the 
abysses of our hearts ! What searchings of 
conscience are like those which we make by 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 113 

this light?" And all this means that in 
sober fact we must concede to the Bible 
unrivaled power in bringing a man to moral 
self -consciousness. 

In a similar sense it must be said on the 
other hand, even of the Old Testament, 
that it is, if I may quote myself again, 
^'the one great religious book of antiquity. 
Religious books in abundance of course the 
ancient world had, and we need not under- 
estimate any of them. But for the actual 
life of the civilization of this twentieth cen- 
tury only the Bible is of prime significance. 
These Old Testament writers have been, as 
a matter of fact, among all the ancient 
writers, the world's great spiritual and re- 
ligious seers. In even higher degree than 
we owe art and literature to the Greeks, and 
law to the Romans, do we owe religion to 
the Jews. Here in this ancient literature, 
whatever the critical results, is contained 
the record of the preeminent meetings of 
God with men, down to the time of Christ." 

And if this can be said even of the Old 
Testament, how much more is it true of the 
New, with its vision of the supreme per- 
sonality of Jesus. And for spiritual self- 



114 RELIGION AS LIFE 

discovery, this is most significant. For, 
just so surely as religious interest is deeply 
laid in the very foundations of man's nature ; 
just so surely as religion is the supreme 
factor "in the organizing and regulating 
of our personal and collective life"; just 
so surely as it brings us into the highest 
personal relation of which we are capable 

— the relation that gives reality and mean- 
ing and value to all other relations ; just 
so surely as religion is thus the deepest 
experience into which a man may enter ; 

— even so surely must that book which is 
the transcendent religious book of the 
world, stir our whole natures as nothing 
else can stir them, in just the proportion 
in which we lay ourselves open to its in- 
fluence and enter with appreciative imder- 
standing into the experiences there laid 
bare. For the unity of our natures makes 
it impossible that this highest appeal should 
be responded to, without profound influence 
upon all the rest of our life. As does no 
other book, therefore, the Bible brings to 
consciousness the whole man. 

As the record of the progressive seeking 
of men after God, and of the progressive 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 115 

revelation of God to men, moreover, the 
Bible offers peculiar help in the develop- 
ment of our own highest consciousness ; 
for it enables us to relive, as it were, in 
our own personal experience this whole 
religious life of the world, to apply thus, 
to our own deepest life-problems a real 
historical method. And hardly any pro- 
cedure could be more helpful in bringing 
us to intelligent consciousness of ourselves 
than this retracing of the most important 
steps in the working out of character and 
faith in the world. 

But the Bible is all this, finally, because 
it is above all else a book of honest testi- 
mony to experience. Its supreme value lies 
just here. For the testimony of another, 
as we have seen, is our chief road to en- 
largement of life. Most of all, it is through 
such simple honest witness that the New 
Testament puts us face to face with the 
redeeming personality of Jesus. What- 
ever our theories about the Bible, it is not 
as compelling authority, but as simple 
honest witness, that the New Testament 
brings us emancipating power. In Herr- 
mann's words, ''The inner life of Jesus is 



ii6 RELIGION AS LIFE 

stamped on the testimony of men who have 
been set free by him. In this way has it 
become a force in history, and in no other 
way was that possible. Hence we can lay 
hold on it and make it ours only when we 
let the witness of his disciples lay hold on 
us. " And that witness the Christian ' ' finds 
in Scripture as nowhere else." 

Now if this is the priceless and indispen- 
sable service of the Bible, it would seem to 
indicate that man's greatest sotu-ce of 
spiritual Hfe is still the personality of 
Jesus. And we are brought, therefore, 
face to face with the question of the abiding 
significance of Jesus. ^ 

President Harris of Amherst College 
said, four or five years ago, ''I venture to 
say that the Protestant Reformation itself 
did not work a greater, though perhaps a 
more violent, change than the last quarter 
of a century has marked in religious thought, 
belief, and life." In this short twenty-five 
years — it is a commonplace to say — 

^ Another line of treatment is followed in the author's 
Theology and the Social Consciousness, pp. 184-201. Cf. 
also Letters on the Greatness and Simplicity of the Christian 
Faith, pp. 179-199. 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 117 

religion has felt increasingly the influence 
of natural science, of the conception of 
evolution in particular, of the new psy- 
chology, of the new science of sociology, 
and its practical accompaniment — the 
social consciousness, the application of the 
historic spirit to religious ideas and doctrines, 
the whole consequent work of higher criti- 
cism, the great movement of study that we 
denominate ''comparative religion," the 
more and more searching investigation of 
New Testament sources, and a great new 
practical emphasis and test in philosophy. 
Is it possible that the meaning of anything 
can be the same in the face of a union of 
movements like these ? Let us ask it 
frankly. Has Jesus still supreme meaning ? 
And yet, Adolf Harnack, speaking as 
Rector of the world's greatest university, 
in this twentieth century, and in the face 
of all these movements, can begin his 
famous book, What is Christianity? with 
the sentence, "The great English philos- 
opher John Stuart Mill has somewhere 
observed that mankind cannot be too often 
reminded that there was once a man of 
the name of Socrates. That is true ; but 



ii8 RELIGION AS LIFE 

still more important is it to remind mankind 
again and again that a man of the name of 
Jesus Christ once stood in their midst." 
It seems like an echo of the apologetic of 
the New Testament writers. And it is 
indeed only another man trying to say, as 
honestly to his own generation as they to 
theirs, what significance this man Jesus has 
for him. 

What significance has Jesus for us ? 
Has his personality still indispensable help 
to give us ? That depends upon the answer 
to another question, What do we want ? 
The shortest and truest answer to that 
question probably is in the single word — 
life. We want the fullest, richest, largest 
life that men are capable of ; and that 
would at least require answer to certain 
great, insistent questions of the race, like 
Kant's famous three : What can I know ? 
What ought I to do ? For what may I 
hope ? Few of us would doubt — what 
these three questions impl}- — that the 
largest and richest life cannot be lived 
without convictions and ideals and hopes ; 
and the answer to these questions must 
be an answer, too, that gives power to 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 119 

live this life of convictions, of ideals, of 
hopes. 

Now if we are to come anywhere into 
larger life, the method, as we have seen, 
is mental and spiritual fellowship, and our 
greatest need, thus, is always the touch of 
significant lives. The continuous miracle 
of the centuries is the miracle of individual 
personality. Large and rich and varied 
have been the lives of earth's greatest ones, 
and we are still, in the daily education of the 
schools, sharing the visions of many an 
ancient Jew and Greek and Roman ; and 
our lives would be poorer without them. 
But, in spite of all the questions and en- 
largements of knowledge, and change in 
points of view of this whole revolutionary 
time, is there any reasonable doubt that, 
for the living of that larger life which we 
modern men demand, and for any signifi- 
cant deepening of our life, no personality 
has any help to give comparable with that 
of the Galilean Jesus ? Is there, even to- 
day, any surer road to the satisfaction of 
the thirst for life in all its prof ounder mean- 
ings, than that a man should count himself 
— with whatever questionings — first and 



I20 RELIGION AS LIFE 

foremost, a disciple of Jesus ? In the light 
of all that modem research has brought to 
view, let us put to Jesus Kant's three 
questions : What can I know ? What 
ought I to do ? For what may I hope ? 

And, first, has Jesus still power to help 
the modem man to answer the question, 
What can I know ? 

Under this question, the most insistent 
inquiry of all, for the human race, is. What 
can I know of God, and the consequent 
meaning of my own life ? And upon the 
answer to that question, more than upon 
any other, depend the significance and 
peace and joy of the life of men. And for 
the man of to-day who wishes to build his 
faith not upon ingenious argument, but 
upon assured and well-recognized facts, 
there is no ground so sure for belief in the 
existence and in the love of a real living 
God as this single great fact of Christ him- 
self, and of the results that have flowed 
from his life. The argument goes upon the 
simple assumption that if we are ever to 
discern the real nature of the ultimate 
World-Ground, our best light must come, 
not from the lesser, but from the greatest 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 121 

and most significant facts. For myself, I 
see no way to doubt that, as the supreme 
person of history, Christ is the most signifi- 
cant of all facts known to us, and therefore 
the best basis for direct and decisive 
inference to the nature of the World- 
Ground — to a God of character like his 
own. 

And so Paulsen, present-day philosopher, 
after speaking of various dogmas and opin- 
ions often asserted to be of the essence of 
Christianity, says for himself: "But if I 
am allowed to say what I mean, and to be- 
lieve what I can understand and conceive, 
then, unmindful of the ridicule of the scoffer 
and the hatred of the guardian of literalism, 
I may, even in our days, confess to a belief 
in God who has revealed himself in Jesus. 
The life and death of Jesus make plain to 
me the meaning of life, the meaning of all 
things in general ; but that which enables 
me to live and shows me the import of life, 
I call God and the manifestation of God. 
The most upright, truthful, and liberal- 
minded man may subscribe to all that to- 
day as openly as ever before." 

Have we adequately measured the great- 



122 RELIGION AS LIFE 

ness of the gift to our modern life of the 
personality of whom these words may be 
truthfully spoken ? Quite aside from any 
doctrine of Messiahship, and unaffected 
by the Greek theory of the Logos, must 
not the modern man who truly understands 
himself still say unfeignedly, with Paul, 
''Thanks be to God for his unspeakable 
gift" ? For it is here implied, it should be 
noticed, that there is much more in Jesus 
than bare evidence of the existence of God. 
There is ''that which enables me to live," 
says Paulsen. The greatness of the gift 
of Jesus is not merely that he points, thus, 
however convincingly, to the fact of God, 
but that he means to bring men into real 
fellowship with God. 

Here, I venture to think, the modem age 
needs Jesus as no other age has ever needed 
him. The road into assured communion 
with God for earlier generations was far 
easier than for ours. For our age has come 
in such preeminent degree to scientific and 
moral self-consciousness that for men to-day 
the previous easier roads into the religious 
life are in large degree closed. The psy- 
chological treatment, for example, of mysti- 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 123 

cal experiences has made it impossible 
for us to take at their own valuation all 
kinds of ecstatic states ; and we can feel 
no surety in these short cuts to communion 
with God by means of a religious experience 
that cannot bear the rational and ethical 
test. It is just at this point that Christian- 
ity has its supreme gift to make to the man of 
to-day. For the deeper our moral conscious- 
ness, the greater our sense of moral need. 
In Herrmann's words, ''We feel ourselves 
to be separated from God, and conse- 
quently crippled in our faith by things 
which troubled the ancients very little. . . . 
Therefore, the only God that can reveal 
himself to us is one who shows himself 
to us in our moral struggle as the Power 
to which our souls are really subject. This 
is what is vouchsafed to us in the revelation 
of God in Jesus Christ." Christ does not 
merely tell us of God and of his holiness and 
love ; he does much more, — he makes us 
able to believe this. He, and no other as 
he, searches, humbles, assures, and exalts 
us at the same time. "When once he has 
attracted us by the beauty of his Person, 
and made us bow before him by its exalted 



124 RELIGION AS LIFE 

character, then, even amid our deepest 
doubts, that Person of Jesus will remain 
present with us as a thing incomparable, the 
most precious fact in history, the most 
precious fact oiir life contains." 

What language can measure the greatness 
of the gift that Jesus thus makes to the 
present work-a-day life of the man who 
thinks ? What language can measure the 
meaning of the simple fact that there has 
once appeared among us men a life that can 
call out absolute trust, a life into the pres- 
ence of which we may come, out of any ex- 
perience, to find renewed within us our 
deepest faith, our highest ideals ? 

In all this there is implied that in the life 
and spirit of Jesus we have the best light, 
also, on our ethical ideals, that human 
thought and experience know — the best 
answer to our second question, What ought 
I to do ? Ranke only expresses the 
common judgment of men when he writes : 
''More guiltless and more powerful, more 
exalted and more holy, has naught ever 
been on earth than his conduct, his life 
and his death. The human race knows 
nothing that could be brought, even afar 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 125 

off, into comparison with it." Here is for 
us a genuine ''personalized conscience." 

As to Christ's contribution to human life 
at a single point of ethical significance, 
Harnack can say: ''Jesus Christ was the 
first to bring the value of every human soul 
to light, and what he did no one can any 
more undo. We may take up what rela- 
tion to him we will : in the history of the 
past no one can refuse to recognize that it 
was he who raised humanity to this level." 
And Wundt and Lotze confirm this judg- 
ment. 

There has been printed in editions of 
many thousands and translated into several 
modern languages a plain little story with 
the subtitle "What Would Jesus Do?" 
We may contend that the question is not 
accurately phrased, but we cannot doubt 
that the asking of that question has a sig- 
nificance for men that the substitution of 
no other name for Jesus would permit it 
for a moment to have. It was John Stuart 
Mill who wrote: "Not even now could it 
be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a 
better translation of the rule of virtue from 
the abstract into the concrete, than to 



126 RELIGION AS LIFE 

endeavor so to live that Christ would ap- 
prove of our life." 

Moreover, though one sees clearly that 
Jesus is not dealing primarily with questions 
of modem culture and civilization, it re- 
mains true that the modem social conscious- 
ness, in its most earnest endeavor, can do 
nothing more than apply the spirit of his 
teaching and his life to the new^er problems 
of our own day. And that higher civic 
virtue, for which we wait, is the embodi- 
ment only of his principle : ' ' He that would 
be first among you shall be servant of all." 
It is not too much to say, in the words of a 
modem historian, ''The image of Christ 
remains the sole basis of all moral culture, 
and in the measure in which it succeeds in 
making its light penetrate is the moral cul- 
ttire of the nations increased or diminished." 

With these answers to the questions. What 
can I know ? and What ought I to do ? 
Jesus enables the most modem of men to 
turn to the question, For what may I 
hope ? with an assurance nowhere else to be 
gained.^ The greatest proposition of re- 

1 Cf . the author's Tlie Seeming Unreality of the Spirit- 
ual Life, pp. 237 ff. 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 127 

ligious faith to which the human race has 
attained, or to which, so far as our highest 
ethical imagination can see, it ever may 
attain, is the simple affirmation, God is 
like Jesus. And if God is like Jesus, life 
cannot possibly prove a mockery for any 
soul who has been true to the inner light. 
If God is like Jesus, it is not true that men 
have been made on a plan so large that ages 
cannot suffice for growth equal to their 
capacity, and still must find themselves 
snuffed out like a candle in the dark, after 
a few vain years of aspiration, of cherished 
ideal, of hard-fought struggle, of deepening 
friendship. No, it is not true ! Doubtless 
our best human achievement is faulty 
enough ; but his life and vision are poor 
indeed, who has not caught glimpses of 
other lives, redolent of the grace and mercy 
that we would fain ascribe to God ; and 
God knows, if there be a God, that they 
deserve to go on and not to die. 

Here, again, we are driven directly back 
to Christ for our strongest assurance. So 
Matheson speaks, in a passage I have else- 
where quoted, of ''the impossible conse- 
quences of a denied future." ''If there be 



128 RELIGION AS LIFE 

no immortality, Christ is dead — the ptirest, 
the fairest, the loveHest Hfe that ever 
breathed has become less than the napkin, 
less than the grave-clothes, less than the 
sepnlcher. It is to Paul an impossible 
consequence. He cannot think of Christ 
as dead. He says, 'If Christ be dead, 
death must be a delusion.' Did you never 
feel this experience ? You parted with a 
friend an hour ago, and the next hour you 
heard that he was dead ; you said, ' Im- 
possible ! ' And when it was confirmed, you 
said again, ' Impossible ! If he be dead, then 
death is not to die. I must have mis- 
named it, misread it, mistaken the in- 
scription on its doorway. Death hence- 
forth is a gate of life to me.'" ''Son of 
Man, whenever I doubt of life, I think of 
Thee. Nothing is so impossible as that 
Thou shouldst be dead. I can imagine the 
hills to dissolve in vapor, and the stars to 
melt in smoke, and the rivers to empty 
themselves in sheer exhaustion ; but I feel 
no limit in Thee. Thou never growest old 
to me. Last century is old, last year is 
old, last season is an obsolete fashion ; but 
Thou art not obsolete. Thou art abreast 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 129 

of all the centuries, nay, Thou goest before 
them like the star. I have never come up 
with Thee, modern as I am. Thy picture 
is at home in every land. A thousand have 
fallen at its side, but it has kept its bloom ; 
old Jerusalem, old Rome, new Rome — 
it has been young amid them all. There- 
fore, when oppressed by the sight of death, 
I shall turn to Thee. I shall see my im- 
mortality in Thee. I shall read the possi- 
bilities of my soul in Thee. I shall measure 
the promise of my manhood by Thee. I 
shall comfort myself by the impossible con- 
clusion, ' If there be no immortality, Christ 
is dead.' " The real ground, that is, of 
faith in immortality is Jesus himself, his 
character, his teaching, his death. 

It is written of one of those fateful crises 
in the life of Jesus, when was fought out, 
under the leadership of Peter, one of the 
world's ''decisive battles," that, in the sift- 
ing out of his following, Jesus finally turned 
to the Twelve to ask: ''Will ye also go 
away?" And the fourth gospel makes 
Peter answer in words often since wrung 
from human lips in like crisis hours : "Lord, 
to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words 

K 



I30 RELIGION AS LIFE 

of eternal life. And we have believed and 
know that thou art the Holy One of God." 
And this answer of a struggling soul in a 
Capernaum synagogue in the far-away 
years remains still, so far as I can see, the 
best answer that the human heart, reaching 
out for God and right and hope in answer 
to the challenging questions of our own day, 
can make: ''Lord, to whom shall we go? 
Thou hast the words of eternal life. And 
we have believed and know that thou art 
the Holy One of God." 

The situation described in the gospel 
was not an easy one for the Twelve. They, 
too, understand but partially what Jesus 
means, though he has made it all too clear 
that many of their conceptions of Messiah- 
ship are doomed to disappointment. But 
still they have been long enough with 
Jesus to know that there is no one else to 
whom they may better go. If the secret 
of the spiritual life, they are saying through 
Peter, if the true life with God, if the as- 
surance of the Father, are not with thee, 
surely they are with no one. If there is 
any hope at all, it is with thee ; to go back 
from thee and to give up our faith in thee, 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 131 

is to give up all faith in truth, in righteous- 
ness, in God. A situation very like this is 
the exact situation to-day. Questions and 
difficulties and doubts we may have, but we 
cannot have less of them away from Jesus. 
Such light as we have gathers right here, 
about him. ''Lord, to whom shall we go ? " 
And we too, with Peter, pass on, through 
the troubled, half -bewildered questioning 
and struggle, with gathering strength and 
assurance, to the positive ground, and 
say with him: ''Thou hast the words of 
eternal life." We have found new life with 
thee ; little by little, as we have stayed 
with thee and heard thy words and felt the 
touch of thy spirit, our point of view, our 
desires, our ambitions, have changed. And 
now that you force the question upon us, 
the answer is ready, and we can see that 
"all the springs of our life are in thee." 
We cannot give thee up. We live in thee ; 
and the quality of this new life we have 
found with thee verifies itself as eternal. 
Thou bringest us into the very certainty 
and sharing of the life of the eternal God. 
Thou canst not'pass. " Thou hast the words 
of eternal life." 



/ 



132 RELIGION AS LIFE 

With faith tested, thus, by experience of 
Jesus in life, Peter is able to go on to say : 
''We have believed and know that thou 
art the Holy One of God." Whether this 
was a Messianic title or not, he can hardly 
have used it here with the full sense of it 
as such. He is simply speaking out of his 
heart what he has found Jesus to be, and 
naturally drops into this sacred confession. 
In this hour of questioning he has hardly 
gone far enough yet for any theological 
formulations ; he is only answering the 
heart-searching inquiry of his Master, and 
he finds that he can say, and must say that 

— as never before, and as nowhere else, 
as no prophet has been imagined by him 

— he has felt in Jesus the living touch of 
God. Jesus has made him feel his sin and 
God at the same time. The words indicate, 
too, the source of his feeling — ' ' the Holy 
One of God. " His great argument, that is, 
finally, and ours too, is the character of 
Jesus. With the prologue of this fourth 
gospel, we still may say: ''We beheld his 
glory, glory as of the only begotten of the 
Father, full of grace and truth." This 
is the great miracle of the history of the 



THE SOURCES OF LIFE 133 

race, and if this is true, we can easily 
grant or spare all the rest. And it is true 
— the one great fact of this history of our 
earth. ** The Light is come." 

Thus, even in our hours of crisis, Jesus 
answers our insistent questions : What can 
I know ? What ought I to do ? For what 
may I hope ? And, face to face with him, 
we may say with Peter: ''If the solution 
is not in him, there is no solution. He meets 
the test of life. And the great ground of 
our confidence is his character and the inner 
appeal of God in him." So surely has 
Jesus abiding significance for the entire 
spiritual life of men. He is still the great 
source of life. 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 

Opposing Personalities 

Our previous discussion has already in- 
dicated that Hfe finds most dangerous 
enemies in the peril of the lower attain- 
ment, and in the lack of honesty and fellow- 
ship with the best ; and so in refusing to 
face the outstanding facts of life with an 
honest reaction upon them, and in turning 
away from the supreme sources of life. 
Here, however, we are thinking not of these 
impersonal perils, but of the dangers lurk- 
ing in those essential personal relations 
from which we cannot turn aside. The 
spiritual life is so entirely a life ultimately 
of personal relations, that we cannot ignore 
the dangers that lie here. In simple hon- 
esty, too, we have no right to be oblivious 
to this darker side of life. The considera- 
tion of the perils in our personal relations 
peculiarly concerns, also, those whose calling 

134 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 135 

is largely personal in its nature. More- 
over, few lessons are so valuable to any of 
us as those that may be learned from 
studying our own lives side by side with 
the lives of far greater souls. There is a 
great wealth of suggestion for the man who 
is willing to put his life, thus, alongside 
of that of the great Master of life, to learn 
the lesson of its parallel experiences. ■ 

It is Matthew who has made most plain 
for us in the central section of his Gospel 
(Matt. 11-14) the personal elements of 
opposition in the life and work of Jesus. 
He sees Jesus confronting the doubt of 
John, the shallow and unappreciative re- 
sponse of the Galileans, the prejudiced and 
malicious opposition of the Pharisees, the 
attempted spiritual dictation of his kindred, 
the contempt of familiarity of his fellow 
townsmen, the opposition of Herod, the 
constant breaking in on his sought retire- 
ment with his disciples, the slowness and 
dullness of this inner circle, and even their 
disloyalty. How much of all this concerns 
us ? The thoughtful observer of his own life 
is certain to find, it may be suspected, experi- 
ences running quite parallel to these of Jesus. 



136 RELIGION AS LIFE 

First of all, in loyalty to truth and to his 
own growth, and in the inevitable difference 
of ideals, every earnest growing man, and 
especially every leader and teacher, must 
expect what Jesus found in his relation to 
John — growing distrust of previous warm 
friends. These friends may be, like John 
the Baptist, those who believed in you 
first and most, and those who perhaps 
started you toward yoiir present ideals, or 
encouraged you in them. Or they may be 
those who began with you and have not 
gone on, or have gone another way, and, in 
any case have lost touch with your point of 
view and with your way of approach to 
things spiritual and divine. They are those 
who miss, perchance, the old phrases, or 
who had mapped out your course for you 
and you have not followed it, but have 
grown away from them. It is not easy to 
face, as a practically certain element in 
one's life-work, this growing distrust of 
previous warm friends. But one can hardly 
expect to be spared it. 

How, now, is one to meet, with calm 
and courage of spirit, this growing distrust 
of friends whom he has loved and whose 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 137 

faith he would gladly sacrifice much to 
keep ? Because he cannot be as sure as 
Jesus was with reference to his own position, 
he may well, in the first place, make this 
growing distrust of old friends an occasion 
for carefully reviewing the grounds of his 
own position again, for making sure that 
he has not, in heedlessness or haste or prej- 
udice, drifted or rushed into positions 
which he cannot justify. He may not as- 
sume without question that he is certainly 
right and that these who distrust him are 
certainly wrong. But when, in modesty, 
he has made such a resurvey of his posi- 
tion, he is sure, in a number of cases, still 
to find that he cannot hope, in loyalty to 
the truth, and in obedience to his own con- 
science, to take a position which can satisfy 
these old friends. He will find it possible 
only carefully to follow Jesus' own method 
in meeting the doubt of John : He will 
warmly sympathize with their difficulty; 
he may gently appeal for their confidence ; 
he will generously praise, recognizing their 
true worth ; and he will send the tender 
message back with the evidence of the life 
and power of his work in fruits, as Jesus 



138 RELIGION AS LIFE 

said to the messengers who came to him 
from John : ' ' Go your way and tell John 
the things which ye do hear and see." 

To bring pain and disappointment to 
warm friends, to gain only growing dis- 
trust — sometimes from fathers and 
mothers, sometimes from earlier teachers 
and one's childhood companions — is a 
sad and bitter experience, but it is a practi- 
cally certain part of the experience of every 
earnestly growing soul. 

The faithful teacher or leader in any high 
sphere may expect, also, to share with 
Jesus the experience of the shallow and in- 
appreciative response of an enthusiastic 
following. It is particularly hard to be 
conscious of failure, where one seems most 
to succeed ; to find the hour of one's ap- 
parent tritimph in truth the hour of bitter 
defeat. But this was the experience of 
Jesus himself. It may be confidently ex- 
pected, in his measure, by every real leader 
in high things. 

For the worst enemies of a great and 
deep cause are its shallow friends ; the 
friends who, because of their very shallow- 
ness, do not understand it, constantly 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 139 

misrepresent it, and therefore always hinder 
it. They have no abiding care for the 
deeper riches. They offer only the shallow 
ground or the choking thorns, putting 
small comparative estimate on the great 
cause to whose support they are pledged. 
They are those who, overriding Jesus' own 
conception of himself, would ''come and 
take him by force and make him king." 
They see in him only a bread-king, not lord 
of all life, and the supreme revelation of 
God. They have no power to weigh spirit- 
ual worth ; they can measure only economic 
values, can count only loaves and fishes. 
They hear, therefore, no deep message, 
whether from John or Jesus. They are 
fickle, vacillating children in the market- 
place, not willing to play either wedding 
or funeral — unable to respond greatly 
to the appeal of either joy or sorrow. They 
can face, on the contrary, the greatest 
divine manifestations and be unaroused in 
the depths of their nature, untouched by 
what would move the hardest. The moral 
and spiritual leader becomes to such what 
Ezekiel became to many who heard him : 
*^Lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely 



I40 RELIGION AS LIFE 

song, of one that hath a pleasant voice 
and can play well upon an instrument, for 
they hear thy words, but they do them not." 
These shallow hearers who hear at first 
with prompt enthusiasm are they for 
whom small things are enough ; who feel 
no great thirst, but are pettily satisfied ; 
who refuse to accept the best one has to 
give. 

Now this shallow and unappreciative 
response of a following that may be still 
really enthusiastic, may be, on the one 
hand, a grievous disappointment, or it 
may be, on the other hand, even greater 
peril. If the leader still keeps his aim 
high, if he knows the greatness of his mes- 
sage and of the kingdom of truth in whose 
service he is, the shallow response is bitter 
disappointment indeed, but it does not 
imperil his own life. But if he accept the 
shallow construction put upon his message 
by some who will count themselves his 
most enthusiastic friends, but who, never- 
theless, minister not to his best, nor call 
that best out ; if he accept as satisfactory 
the support of those who are willing, rather, 
to serve his selfish ambitions and make him 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 141 

in his turn bread-king, or would like him 
to be their hired man in the ideal realms, 
like Micah's priest, and pay him well on 
the lower side, but who yet would wrest 
him from his noblest purposes to their 
lower ones, even ''by force" — here is 
deadly peril. The larger service of many a 
life has been wrecked by this shallow re- 
sponse, taken as sufficient and satisfactory 
or even to be gloried in ; because that 
meant that the man himself was lowered, 
his vision lost, his message made as shallow 
as the response. As the member of any 
high calling values his life and that calling, 
he may count no such shallow enthusiastic 
following as success, for it is in truth deep 
failure. He can only face its bitter dis- 
appointment as Jesus faced his — send the 
multitude away, retreat to the mountain to 
pray, bring succor to the faithful few in 
danger of being dazzled by this surface 
enthusiasm, aiid go back to Capernaum to 
sift out his following. 

And he will try definitely to meet this 
shallow response as Jesus met the similar 
response of the Galileans, by showing its 
unreasonableness, by reproof of its blind 



142 RELIGION AS LIFE 

folly, by appeal and tender recurring invita- 
tion, while throughout refusing, nevertheless, 
to lower his message or his mission to the 
low demand of this shallow and inapprecia- 
tive, though it be enthusiastic, response. 
But he may not hope either wholly to pre- 
vent or wholly to evade such an answer to 
his work. 

Neither is it possible for one to escape, 
in any faithful ministry of the truth, the 
bitter, prejudiced, malicious opposition of 
self-satisfied and self-ordained conservators 
of the truth and savers of the ark. Here, 
too, one must walk in the way of the Master 
of life. The teacher and every servant of 
the truth must have a passion for reality, 
an earnestness in pursuit of the truth, that 
brooks no arbitrary limits. He is sure, 
therefore, to have to face the opposition 
of those who profess to judge from high 
standards, but yet are sticklers for hoary 
rules, repeaters and testers of phrases, 
worshipers of customs, and echoers of 
creeds never really their own, rather than 
contenders for judgment and mercy. They 
are so prejudiced that they may ascribe, 
as in the case of Jesus, the divinest works 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 143 

to evil, thus perverting all moral and spirit- 
ual discernment. They are therefore able 
to understand only certain magical signs, 
not the true spiritual and moral appeal. 
They are empty souls, destitute of all real 
moral and religious appreciation and en- 
thusiasm, and with no sense of the great- 
ness of the spiritual call. It is still quite 
possible that the worst enemies of the truth 
and of real spirituality may be among the 
most zealous religionists, and those that 
count themselves most concerned for the 
truth. 

Even a humble and patient and tolerant 
and loving ministry to the lives of others, 
that is nevertheless faithful, cannot hope 
wholly to escape such bitter and malicious 
opposition. And one needs all the power- 
ful influence of the example of Jesus to be 
able to meet such opposition rightly. Re- 
membering one's own need and short- 
sightedness and temptability, one will wish 
first of all to make sure that he has not 
deserved any part of this opposition, to see 
to it that if at any point he has failed herein, 
he does not further provoke needless an- 
tagonism. But with this point guarded, 



144 RELIGION AS LIFE 

one will have to meet the inevitable opposi- 
tion which still remains, with Christ's own 
profoimd sense of the emptiness of soul 
involved, and with the deep pity which 
such a state provokes as can nothing else. 
For none are so hopeless as those who do 
not care, who have lost all powder to dis- 
criminate in values. 

And then, for oneself, turning from the 
thought of the opposition which cannot be 
wholly stayed, it will be possible only to 
gird one's soul again for this steady going 
forward with one's work and one's testi- 
mony to the truth, as Jesus did, while 
provoking no needless controversy. Truth 
can only so make progress. How many 
times in the years of every faithfiil Hfe, 
night after night and morning after morn- 
ing, will the soul have to come back to this 
one thought : The only thing I can do is 
simply to go on doing as nearly right as I 
know how ; for I must not, in any case, 
allow myself to be provoked into an atti- 
tude akin to that which opposes me. 
" Consider him that hath endured such gain- 
saying of sinners against himself, that ye 
wax not weary, fainting in your soiils.'* 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 145 

^'It is enough for the disciple that he be as 
his Master." 

Beyond the distrust of previous warm 
friends, beyond the shallow response of en- 
thusiastic followers, beyond the prejudiced 
opposition of the self-satisfied, every highly 
determined soul may expect, with Jesus, 
attempted spiritual dictation on the part of 
those near and dear. In the thick of your 
battle, pressed on every side, because of the 
very strenuousness of your fight, these, 
with natural concern and perhaps with 
some wounded pride, — saying he is ''be- 
side himself," — still ''stand without," hold 
aloof, and yet wish to dictate your course. 
If they come in love, it is still largely mis- 
taken love, caring more for your comfort 
than for your growth and for your work. 

In this attempted dictation on the part 
of those one loves may lie a dire and deadly 
temptation, all the more so because of its 
source. It was not for nothing that Jesus 
said, "And a man's foes shall be they of 
his own household." There is a point 
beyond which you may not allow even love 
itself to tempt you. Love makes it hard 
to refuse to listen. And yet you had not 



146 RELIGION AS LIFE 

loved them half so much, loved you not 
honor more. One must therefore straightly, 
though tenderly and reverently, face this 
opposition and this peril. We must make 
it forever clear to ourselves that no other 
may dictate in our inner life, in the ultimate 
decision of our duty. No other may decide 
for us, no other may force our decision ; 
and they are not true friends who would do 
it. They make, rather, the mistake of the 
companions of Socrates, who would deHver 
him from prison to bind him over to con- 
tinuous self -contempt. 

^'He that loveth father or mother more 
than me is not worthy of me." ''And 
there is meaning in Christ's words," as 
Ruskin says. ''Whatever misuse may have 
been made of them, whatever false proph- 
ets — and heaven knows there have been 
many — have called the young children to 
them, not to bless, but to curse, the assured 
fact remains, that if you will obey God, 
there will come a moment when the voice 
of man will be raised, with all its holiest 
natural authority, against you. The friend 
and the wise adviser — the brother and 
the sister — the father and the master — 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 147 

the entire voice of your prudent and keen- 
sighted acquaintance — the entire weight of 
the scornful stupidity of the vulgar world 
— for once, they will be against you, all 
at one. You have to obey God rather than 
man. The human race, with all its wisdom 
and love, all its indignation and folly, on 
one side, — God alone on the other. You 
have to choose." 

Every leader in the pursuit of the truth 
and in spiritual endeavor is sure to find one 
of the most common and certain elements 
of opposition, as Jesus found it, in the 
further fact that ''the prophet is not with- 
out honor, save in his own country and in 
his own house." The unreadiness to recog- 
nize the message of the known man may be 
assumed, as well as the very common failure 
to support the prophet as prophet and for 
what he really is until after his death. The 
building of the tombs of the prophets, rather 
than following their living voice, was not 
confined to Christ's day. All real leaders 
may expect, therefore, something of that 
contempt that belongs to familiarity from 
those for whom the familiar, just because 
it is familiar, seems of small account ; and 



148 RELIGION AS LIFE 

who, for this very reason, are the more ready 
to run over to the strange voice and the 
novel message. There will always be many 
in any community who find it difficult to 
recognize greatness or worth in itself. 
They are able to see it only when it has been 
properly indorsed by others from outside. 
They repeat again the old questions of the 
contempt of familiarity: ''Is not this the 
carpenter's son ? is not his mother called 
Mary, and his brethren, James, and Joseph, 
and Simon, and Judas ? And his sisters, 
are they not all with us ? Whence then 
hath this man all these things ?" 

While this obstacle is b}^ no means the 
most serious that a man must meet in his 
life-work, it is still a real hindrance, often 
leading to a quite unjust overestimation of 
the outside strange voice or message, that 
may be hard to bear because one cannot help 
feeling the essential injustice of the judg- 
ment. And this very fact may lead one to 
yield to the temptation either to strive 
after the merely novel and strange, or 
popular, rather than the true, — straining 
for effect, — or to press for public recognition 
outside, in the treatment of calls, in public 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 149 

exploitation of one's self in the press or on 
the platform, and so to force recognition at 
home. In either case, the man has con- 
sented to some lowering of himself ; and 
the straining for effect is especially likely 
to give a false note to one's own work and 
message, and to react on one's mood and 
feeling, so that he is no longer a true man 
with a God-given calling. Every true man 
will need rather to stay his soul with Paul's 
conclusion, ''It is a very small thing that 
I should be approved of man's judgment." 

When a man asks himself how he is to 
meet in a high and unselfish spirit, and with 
real dignity and success, this element of 
difficulty in his life-work, it is plain that he 
must first of all, in simple fairness, recognize 
a certain justice in the difficulty he con- 
fronts. He must plainly admit the value 
of different points of view and of the fresh 
putting of things, and allow himself neither 
to oppose nor to be jealous of any gain that 
may so come. Least of all is he to yield 
to the involved temptation to ''stoop to 
conquer." He is to keep himself high and 
noble, and to be sure that the appreciation 
of the seemingly more successful work or 



ISO RELIGION AS LIFE 

messages of others drives him only to seek a 
stronger, deeper, truer work and message 
himself, in order to keep true to his own 
best ideals. For the unjust judgment which 
still remains after all possible allowance, 
the spiritual leader needs to remember that, 
as in Christ's case, popular response is no 
full proof of truth and wisdom, no adequate 
measure of the value of the work done. 
And he must simply keep steadily on in the 
faithful proclamation of the best vision that 
God gives him. Nothing else, in any case, 
is open to him. 

It is Herod, in the conception of Matthew, 
who, moved by Herodias in her exposed 
wickedness, puts an end to the more public 
ministry of Jesus and drives him into com- 
parative retirement. And in every age 
there is always a strong tendency on the 
part of the regular authorities, the powers 
that be, the forces of society, to crush the 
unwonted, to deprecate anything that es- 
sentially changes the routine of the cus- 
tomary, to block any more serious changes. 
The prophet's voice, on the contrary, must 
often be a disturbing voice, and the persis- 
tent call of our own generation for ''the 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 151 

sane," it is to be feared, quite often means 
only, "Leave us undisturbed, don't call the 
conventional in question." 

Of course the real leader in any ideal 
realm must expect the uncompromising 
opposition of those whose evil is challenged 
and who resent the high standard which 
condemns them, who would silence the 
prophet's voice and gladly appeal to the 
authorities against ''this stirrer up of the 
people," this ''disturber of the peace." 
From the days of Socrates and of Jesus, it 
has been easy to make the established 
authorities find an enemy of society in the 
prophetic messenger. The danger of the 
spiritual leader is that he will not be willing 
to be a real prophet speaking out his mes- 
sage ; that he will love peace more than 
purity, and be unwilling to say the de- 
manded word. Some of the best men I 
have known have been tempted to failure 
at this point. It is the peculiar temptation 
of the public man to keep his popularity 
and his reputation for sanity, at the expense 
of real cowardice. He yields to the 
prophet's temptation, — "Speak unto us 
smooth things, prophesy deceits." To be 



152 



RELIGION AS LIFE 



a prophet is no holiday task. A spiritual 
and moral leader must lead, and he must 
often subject himself to severe criticism 
on that account. A prophetic ministry 
to a community or nation must fear God 
rather than men. And the more such pro- 
fessions as preaching and teaching and 
writing become regularly organized func- 
tions in human society, the greater is the 
danger that they will not remain untram- 
meled. The spiritual leader must never 
for an instant admit, either to himself or 
to any one else, that he is the hired man 
of either few or many. He is called to be a 
preserver, helper, inspirer, warner for men's 
moral and spiritual life. He is put in trust 
with the truth, with great community in- 
terests and with men's souls, and as he is 
true to that trust he must speak some 
things, though in meekness and in charity, 
that men do not want to hear. The danger 
at this point in any life-work is very great. 
How, then, may a man meet, in Christ- 
like spirit, this opposition of the customary 
and of unveiled wickedness ? First of all, 
he must make his own position unmis- 
takably clear, though with charity and 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 153 

meekness, and courageously stand for it. 
In the second place, he is neither to seek 
conflict nor to provoke it needlessly. He 
is not to pursue martyrdom, nor to pose as 
a radical reformer. The best reformers 
the world has ever known found their 
work forced on them reluctantly. The 
true prophet can as little covet martyrdom 
as he may allow himself in cowardice. 
And when, through such public opposition, 
his work seems hindered and narrowed, he 
is to turn, as Jesus turned, only the more 
earnestly and fully to his deeper, though 
less conspicuous, work. The shutting out 
of the more public opportunity may mean 
the fruitful shutting in to more significant 
work. 

But even when you have turned with 
full heart to that deepest work given you 
with a few, you must still expect the diffi- 
culty of the constant breaking in on your 
sought retirement and on that deepest work. 
It is sure to come. As men who are trying 
to accomplish some significant and solid 
work, the ''devastator of the day" will be 
always with you. There are few things 
that earnest men need more to make clear 



154 RELIGION AS LIFE 

to themselves from the beginning of their 
life-work, than that they will have to fight 
for time to grow, for time to do solid en- 
during work, for time to do especially the 
particular definite piece of work which God 
has laid on their souls to do. High achieve- 
ment is possible to no man who does not 
carry to his work deep reverence for it, as 
given him of God. One must count on the 
constant interruption and multitudinous 
unforeseen extras that always crowd the 
life of the busy public man. One will be, 
thus, in constant danger of frittering away 
himself and his work and his deepest service. 
It is most important, therefore, that one 
should face definitely and fully this further 
enemy of his life — the constant breaking 
in on his sought retirement and his deepest 
work. Here, too, one needs the inspiration 
and the counsel of Christ's own example. 
One may not allow himself to make the 
monk's mistake ; you cannot withdraw 
from life if you would minister to life. You 
must live in the very midst of it. These 
interruptions, it is true, may be either 
temptations, or calls of God ; and one must 
learn to discriminate. You cannot do every- 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 155 

thing, and you will find yourselves obliged 
to cultivate vigorously Dr. Trumbull's 
''duty of refusing to do good.'* One may 
well confront himself, in the face of mul- 
titudinous opportunities, with the persis- 
tent question, Have I just here a real mes- 
sage ? Is this God's opportunity for me 
just now? or does it, rather, mean leaving 
more imperative and immediate obliga- 
tions ? If the threatened interruption is 
for you truly God's opportunity, then you 
are to use it to the full, gladly, and with 
abandon, and to get back promptly to 
your regularly given work. For your great- 
est work must always lie with that small 
inner circle whose lives you may touch most 
closely. But even the few, it must always 
be remembered, one is training not for their 
own sake alone, but for the service of the 
larger number beyond his immediate reach. 
Even in this most fruitful work, with the 
few nearest to him, the leader cannot escape 
another persistent obstacle. In the work 
with this inner circle particularly committed 
to him, he will be compelled to feel often 
their slowness and dullness ; for they are 
giving, and can give, much less time and 



156 RELIGION AS LIFE 

thought to the themes of the ideal world 
than he. It will often seem to him as if 
exceedingly small progress were being made, 
and he will chafe under the constant need of 
adaptation, of accommodation to narrow- 
ness and prejudice and false education and 
different temperaments. And he will es- 
pecially feel, in what will prove to be some 
of the darkest hours of his higher life-work, 
the painful lack of full sympathy and com- 
plete response to his best, even on the part 
of those who stand closest. He will know 
what it is in much to be left quite alone, 
and he will enter, in his measure, into the 
experience of the solitariness of the Master 
of life. 

One will be able to meet this most in- 
terior obstacle of his life-work, only as he 
definitely aims to cultivate patience with 
what must often seem to him slowness and 
dullness. This greatest work that it is 
possible for any man to do — the giving 
of himself fully to a few — in its very 
nature requires much time and continuous 
association. But as surely as Christ's great- 
est work was not his miracles, nor his public 
preaching and teaching tours, but his 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 157 

close personal training of the little inner 
circle, so surely must any man's greatest 
work lie in the same sphere. This most 
significant opportunity one can meet only 
as Christ did, with time and close associa- 
tion and the steady putting of the truth, 
while he keeps firm in his heart the spirit 
of high hope, because he understands that 
as this intimate work with a few is one's 
most significant and fundamental work, 
as the ends here sought are supremely great, 
so he need not begrudge the greatest pains. 
One must often come back for the staying 
of his soul to the fact that it seems quite 
probable that the larger part of even the 
so-called public ministry of the Master of 
life was devoted chiefly to the training of 
the Twelve ; and one will seek to come into 
the sharing of his own infinite patience and 
hope. 

There is yet one further bitterness which 
the earnest soul may not be spared. It 
is hardly possible that any true leader in a 
large work should be wholly without the 
experience of disloyalty on the part of some, 
even in the inmost circle. There will be 
some betrayals on the part of those who 



iS8 RELIGION AS LIFE 

belong only nominally to the inner group, 
but there will be at least the temporary 
denials of those who really are of the inmost 
circle. That within this bond of intimate 
fellowship disloyalty should appear, must 
always give the sharpest pain of all. No 
considerations can make that experience 
easy ; none can make it other than an abiding 
sorrow. 

Nevertheless, it is open to every learner 
of the Master of life to drink even this 
bitterest draught, in the spirit that Jesus 
showed, — to face the certainty of coming 
defection — ''Ye shall be scattered every 
man to his own and shall leave me alone" 
— with the quiet firm faith in God that 
makes it possible still to say, ''And yet 
I am not alone because the Father is with 
me." He may connect, too, with this faith 
in God, Christ's own conquering, towering 
faith in man, which can look forward even 
past denial and desertion to the assurance 
of the return, and urge, in confidence in that 
work of God already begun in these men, " I 
made supplication for thee, that thy faith 
fail not ; and do thou, when once thou hast 
turned again, stablish thy brethren." 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 159 

To attempt any really spiritual service 
of men — and none of us can be satisfied 
to do nothing here — is no lackadaisical 
calling. It demands, rather, the most virile 
and heroic qualities, coupled with the deep- 
est and most spiritual insight. It invites 
one, as we have seen, to face misunder- 
standing, shallowness, pride and prejudice 
and malice, spiritual dictation, the con- 
tempt of familiarity, the opposition of the 
customary and of unveiled wickedness, the 
thwarting of one's quiet hours, slowness 
and dullness and even disloyalty in the 
inner circle. And one may find them all 
within the bounds of a very small com- 
munity. All classes are represented in these 
enemies of one's life, all degrees of intimacy 

— previous warm friends, enthusiastic fol- 
lowers, open bitter enemies, intimates and 
kindred, authorities, common acquaintances, 
true followers, casual claimants on time 
and thought. All kinds of temptations, 
too, — plain and hidden, subtle and direct, 

— here confront one : the appeal of previous 
warm trust to his loyalty and his desire 
not to pain ; the appeal of shallow followers 
to his love of success and his desire not to 



i6o RELIGION AS LIFE 

disappoint ; the appeal of bitter opponents 
to his love of fight and his possibility of 
prejudice and of hate ; the appeal of kin- 
ship and love to the tenderness of his 
affection and to his love of ease ; the appeal 
of one's familiars to his desire for popularity 
and to his spirit of envy ; the appeal of 
institutional opposition to fear and to ob- 
stinacy ; the temptation, in the casual 
meeting, to thoughtless and careless neglect 
of opportunity ; and with one's intimates 
the temptation to impatience and short- 
sightedness, sometimes even to bitterness 
and resentment, to discouragement and to 
doubt of the love of God and of the possi- 
bilities of men. The appeal is made, thus, 
to motives the lowest and almost the 
highest; for the very heights which one is 
called to walk in his highest service them- 
selves prompt to giddiness. 

All these enemies of life, too, are not only 
difficulties, but, as we have seen, personal 
perils as well. Can one maintain, in the 
face of them, his faith and hope and love ? 
With large tolerance and with tender sym- 
pathy, can one still keep his convictions 
firm, his own ideals high ? The prophetic 



THE ENEMIES OF LIFE i6i 

life, dedicated to the highest service of men, 
just because it is of the prophetic spirit, 
must face all this. On the way to life one 
must face the enemies of life. 



M 



VI 

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 

^^ Life in the Will of God 

We have found the ruHng method of life 
to be honest response to the highest reahties 
and personahties of hfe, regarded as the 
completest manifestations we have of the 
Source of all life. In pressing our way to 
the most significant of these personalities, 
we have found ourselves again and again 
impelled to give the supreme place to the 
personality of Jesus. It cannot seem to us, 
therefore, of small moment, what he thought 
of our relation to the will of God. For it 
seems plain that that ultimate harmony of 
life to which religion looks cannot come to a 
man while he feels himself still at war with 
the universe, constantly baffled by the 
eternal purposes that he sees at work in 
the world. The deepest condition, then, 
of fundamental peace must be, in the 
language of religion, the union of our will 

162 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 163 

with the will of God. At the center of 
that most universal of the vital religious 
documents of the race — the Lord's Prayer 
— Jesus places, thus, most naturally the 
petition, ''Thy will be done." It is the 
very heart of religion, the heart of ethics, 
the center of humanity's highest aspiration. 
We have a right to expect that its thought 
will range wide. 

Yet it may not be forgotten that the 
prayer, ''Thy will be done," has seemed to 
many to be the end of hope rather than the 
assurance of hope. Strange as it sounds, 
it seems almost true for most that this 
prayer is said with a gasp, and connotes 
only bitter trial, deep sorrow, despairing 
outlook. Our hymn books quite univer- 
sally put all hymns gathering about this 
great theme of the will of God under such 
headings as submission, resignation, dis- 
cipline, and trial. The old test of con- 
version — that paradoxical "willingness 
to be damned for the glory of God " — was 
a legitimate climax of this view of the will 
of God. Indeed, there is a singular lack of 
hymns or of other writing that connect 
the note of hope and triumph with the 



i64 RELIGION AS LIFE 

thought of the will of God. Are these 
things, now, an acciirate reflection of the 
thought of Jesus ? Are they signs of a 
genuinely Christian spirit ? or do they come 
far short of such a spirit ? Can we reverse 
the seemingly dominant conception at this 
point, and change the atmosphere of this 
petition from one of gloomy, corroding 
foreboding to one of confident hope ? 

In the fulfillment of this purpose we may 
well consider three things : What this 
prayer meant to Jesus ; how it confronts 
and transcends all the inadequate concep- 
tions of religion that have marked the prog- 
ress of the centuries ; and the necessity 
that modem Christianity, in line with the 
thought of Jesus, should enlarge and deepen 
its conception of the will of God to meet 
the need of the modem world. 

Remembering that the teaching of Jesus 
is never to be separated from himself, a 
threefold assumption plainly underlies this 
petition, and each assimiption is a great 
ground of hope : first, that there is a 
heavenly Father, of character like Christ's 
own ; second, that there is a heavenly life, 
in which God's will is already perfectly 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 165 

done ; third, that God's will is pledged to 
a like heavenly life here on earth. Out of 
these assumptions is born the prayer "Our 
Father, thy will be done, as in heaven, so 
on earth." God's will, that is, backs up 
with its infinite resources every such peti- 
tion, and every corresponding endeavor. 

First of all, then, for Jesus there is at 
the heart of the world a personal will — 
for even our later philosophy can hardly 
carry through an impersonal, or subper- 
sonal, conception ^ — and that personal will 
is the will of a Father, with a character 
like that of Jesus. God is like Jesus ; 
that is the very essence of the Gospel, the 
source of all hope for every worthy aim and 
desire in the heart of man. 

Secondly, this will of the Father has an 
eternal outlook upon another life, for which 
this life is but a training school. There is 
a sphere where God's will is already per- 
fectly done, into which this life emerges. 
There is the immortal hope. This so-called 
eschatological element in the teaching of 
Jesus is unmistakable. It is not to be 

^Cf. the author's The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual 
Life, pp. 74-78. 



i66 RELIGION AS LIFE 

blinked at nor apologized for. The view of 
Jesus would be quite too small, if it failed 
to take in another life and the activity of 
God. This faith is needed, deeply needed, 
if the hearts of men are to be satisfied. 
If death ends all, it is mockery to talk of a 
satisfying hope ; for no jugglery with pretty 
words and phrases can fill empty hearts 
or make good extinguished lives. If we 
must give up the hope of personal im- 
mortality, let us do it, at least, with self- 
respecting honesty, and not befool ourselves 
or others with substitutes that are not substi- 
tutes at all. I confess I much prefer on this 
point the blunt honesty of John Stuart Mill to 
the ingenious befogging of some modern al- 
truists. That some men seem to themselves 
to have discovered that they have no need 
or desire for the immortal life may be true ; 
but it is not a "thing to be said boastfully, 
and it is small proof for those of us who 
have both desire and need. For us it 
must seem that such men have not 
awakened to full self -consciousness, or at 
least not to the logical thought of what 
such self -consciousness means. One won- 
ders if they have ever had aims not to be 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 167 

snugly packed within a few years, or if 
they are aware of what even one friendship 
may involve. 

Jesus, at least, is in no uncertainty here. 
He does not so much assert, or assure, as 
assume. The atmosphere of his whole life 
is that of the eternal. He walks in the 
midst of it ; his thought, his spirit, are no- 
where else fully at home. And, therefore, 
he delivered ''all them who through fear 
of death were all their lifetime subject to 
bondage." 

But, in the third place, Jesus is not 
thinking in this petition merely, nor mainly, 
of another life. The language is directed 
unmistakably to earth and to this life. 
*'Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on 
earth." The attempt on the part of some 
modern scholars to make the aim of Jesus 
merely eschatological and miraculous is 
wrecked on this petition alone, as well as 
on the whole sweep of his ethical teaching. 
Unless this petition and this ethical teach- 
ing are quite to be emptied of meaning, or 
an absolute break is to be made between 
the different parts of his teaching, Jesus 
is steadily thinking of an increasing reign of 



i68 RELIGION AS LIFE 

God on earth. Indeed, the reign of God, 
in its very nature, must look to all men 
wherever they are, and to all that concerns 
them. This prayer, therefore, looks in 
the mind of Jesus to the great goal, the one 
ambition of his life, — the reign of God in 
the individual and social life of all God's 
children in heaven and on earth — the 
bringing of heaven to earth, and the train- 
ing on earth for the great goals of the 
heavenly life. Other men set as their goal 
some one good, some single aspect of this 
will ; Christ's goal is universal, all-embrac- 
ing : ^'Thy will be done, as in heaven, so 
on earth." In the coolness and calmness of 
careful deliberation, this Galilean peasant 
— just as other men decide to be farmers, 
or lawyers, or physicians — takes on as 
his earthly calling, as his reasonable life 
ambition, the full reign of God on earth. 
For simple audacity and vitality of will, 
the world knows nothing comparable with 
that ambition. Into the splendor of that 
audacity and vitality of will all who would 
name themselves after Christ are asked to 
come. For to this purpose he soberly 
commits his disciples, every one, in this 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 169 

central petition of the prayer that was 
always to characterize them — ''Thy will 
be done." 

It is, then, no cringing cry; it is no 
slave's submission to superior strength ; 
it is no plaintive wail ; it is no outcry of an 
enfeebled, broken will, as we may be some- 
times tempted to think. Rather is it the 
highest reach of a will superbly disciplined 
to a world's task, enlightened by a reason 
that can think the thoughts of God, in- 
spired by an imagination that sees the 
ultimate consummation, warmed by a heart 
that feels the needs of men, and glows with 
the greatness of the Father's purpose for 
them, — ''Our Father, thy will be done." 

This petition includes every good for 
every son of man, — all high enterprise 
and all great goals. All justice, all truth, 
all beauty, all merciful ministry, are here 
enclosed — all the triumphs of science, of 
literature, of art, of music, of philanthropy, 
of highest spiritual endeavor — the vision 
of the city beautiful, the city honest, the 
city serving, the vision of a redeemed hu- 
manity sharing in the very life of God. 
For all these are but expressions of men's 



lyo RELIGION AS LIFE 

God-given natures. All this, then, we 
may believe this prayer means for Jesus. 

The history of religion — nay, the his- 
tory of humanity itself — may be said to 
be the history of the varying conceptions 
of the will of God ; for religion grows with 
growth in that conception, and religion, we 
may not forget, is life's supreme factor. 
We are to consider, therefore, in the second 
place, how Christ's thought of this prayer, 
with his clear sense of a God whose purpose 
includes all good for all men in both lives, 
at once confronts and challenges and tran- 
scends all those wavering, inadequate con- 
ceptions of the will of God that have marked 
the progress of the centuries. In line with 
one of the deepest trends of our own time, 
we need to put the will in the foreground 
and to confront these defective interpreta- 
tions of the will of God with Christ's own 
thought in this prayer. 

Religion is, therefore, first of all, no 
matter of ceremonial, of ritual distinctions 
of clean and unclean, no pleasing of an ar- 
bitrary God with sacrifices and offerings, 
as most pre-Christian religions thought, — ■ 
no external observance of any kind. A 



/ 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 171 

holy God of character can find satisfaction 
in nothing short of inner obedience. The 
Father finds deHght only in the filial spirit. 
Even the Old Testament prophet knew 
that ''to obey is better than sacrifice." 
It has been a long and toilsome evolution 
of humanity, this sloughing off of the 
ceremonial conception of religion ; and 
many are still in bondage to it. But when 
Jesus put in the hearts of men the prayer 
to a God revealed in his own life, "Our 
Father, thy will be done," all external ob- 
servances slipped away from essential re- 
ligion, as having all their significance, only 
as being absolutely insufficient expressions 
of an inner life. ''Thy will be done" in 
the inner life. 

Religion, again, is no merely beautiful 
thing for aesthetic admiration, as Hellenic 
thought, and many a modern echo of it 
have tried to conceive. Its life is beautiful, 
but with a beauty no mere aesthete can ever 
take in. For it is beautiful with the glory 
of the most majestic of all possible aims — 
those of the will of God — aims that do 
not balk at precise and prosaic manifes- 
tations on earth, and do not stop short of 



\ 

\ 



172 RELIGION AS LIFE 

the sweep of the ages. ''Thy will be done 
as in heaven, so on earth." 

Religion, too, is no merely true doctrine 
for intellectual apprehension, as Greek and 
Roman philosopher or orthodox or rational- 
istic modern would have it. Its teaching 
is true, but with a truth no mere scholar 
can ever reach ; for its truth is the truth 
born of experience and wrought out in the 
laboratory of life. ''Thy will be done." 

And religion is no mere seeking of mystical 
experiences, either that half swoon and half 
ecstasy, for which, as Nash says, the Jew 
forsook his prophets with their social vision, 
and the Greek his philosophers with their 
rational pursuit of truth. The sweep of 
religion's emotional life is, indeed, widest 
of all, just because it has to do with the 
unsearchable riches of the divine personality. 
But its prayer is not, ''Give me great 
emotions, ' ' but * ' Thy will be done. ' ' Under- 
neath the thought of that will of God lie, 
it is true, peace and joy unfathomable, 
and nowhere else to be found ; but the 
emotion is incidental to the will, not in- 
dependent of it, or an end in itself. "Our 
Father, thy will be done." 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 173 

Religion, once more, is no practice of 
ascetic self -mortification, as the monk, 
ancient or medieval, thought it. It is 
good tidings. It rejoices in life. It aims 
to bring continually larger life. It does 
pay gladly the price of unhesitatingly 
subordinating all lesser goods, for it knows 
the cost of high attainment, even in small 
enterprise ; and it takes joyfully what so 
comes in the greatest endeavors. But it 
seeks 'Hhe life that is life indeed,'' in union 
with the will of God. And it knows that 
whatever self-discipline, whatever surrender 
of lesser goals are involved in that will, 
that will of God alone is largest life. There- 
fore, not in abandonment of life, but in 
secure possession of it, it prays, ''Our Father, 
thy will be done." 

Nor is religion an idle longing for heaven, 
or an awaiting for some miraculous de- 
liverance from heaven, as the ascetic and 
world-weary have ever tended to think. 
It knows, indeed, its need of a goal more 
than earthly. Its vision is age-long, and 
it stays its soul with the immortal hope, 
but it is the hope of a life of ethical content. 
It cannot, therefore, be indifferent to the 



174 RELIGION AS LIFE 

triiimph of righteousness right here on 
earth. It faces the earthly Hfe, therefore, 
in no despairing, pessimistic mood. Earth, 
too, is a room in the Father's house ; his 
will is here too, to reign. To that, every 
child of the Father is pledged. As in 
heaven, so on earth, thy will be done. 

The prayer of Jesus means, too, that 
religion is no bare adoption of abstract 
ethical principles, as Stoic philosophy con- 
ceived. It is the great contribution of 
religion that it is able not only to unify all 
ideals, but to make these all, living, warm, 
tender in their union in the personal will 
of a personal God. And that will, in the 
conception of Jesus, is a Father's will, that 
says to each child : 

O, heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself ! 
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love. 

" Our Father, thy will be done." 

And conceived even as response to a 
personal will, religion is not something 
arbitrary laid upon man from without, 
external and foreign to him, as the Pharisee 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 175 

in all generations has conceived. God's 
will is laid down in the structure of man's 
very being, and we cannot be true even to 
ourselves, and say ''No" to him. The 
deep, far-reaching questions of our own 
time are driving us back irresistibly to the 
thought of God as working in us. It is as 
though God were himself saying to us, in 
all these questions concerning miracle, super- 
natural birth, and bodily resurrection of 
Jesus, — ''You shall not believe in me on 
any of these external grounds." It is 
Christ's insistence that men shall follow 
him not because of the signs, but for what 
he is in himself. It is the providential 
demand of our own time, God's own voice 
to us, — "You must have an inner religion, 
if you are to have one at all." It is not a 
light error in Jesus' thought, this laying 
the whole stress upon external, marvelous 
sign ; for it involves, he believes, rejection 
of the highest in him ; and he will be fol- 
lowed for what he is, not for marvels that 
he works. To our generation, even as to 
his own, he seems to be saying, "There 
shall no sign be given to it." And by this 
very path, perchance, we shall find our way 



176 RELIGION AS LIFE 

back to faith, where faith now is difficult. 
For, in the words of another, ''You can 
never compel moral admiration by physical 
power; but you can understand that the 
lower ranges of life may be subservient to 
one whose greatness lies in the highest, — 
that is, in the moral order of life." Ex- 
ternal authority has its undoubted function 
in the history of the race and of the indi- 
vidual. But it is temporary and provisional 
always. Its end is the doing away of the 
need of itself, for it seeks the establishment 
in each soul of an inner life of its own. 
Authority itself means nothing where it 
does not make an inner appeal. And, 
once more, therefore, with Jesus we pray 
to the Father of our spirits, whose will is 
in our very being, ''Thy will be done." 

And finally, religion is no merely negative 
aim of any kind, as the Pharisee again and 
all mere fighters of evils have often been 
tempted to think, but the fulfillment of a 
great divine, positive will. The religious 
man is not to thank God that he is not as 
other men are. The history of mankind 
shows all too plainly appetites so dangerous 
as easily to seem best extirpated altogether. 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 177 

Nevertheless, it is no emptied soul that can 
satisfy the thought or desire of Jesus. It 
is not mere absence of evil, but the kindling 
of great new enthusiasms, devotions, asso- 
ciations, and causes, that can alone fulfill 
the will of God. It is this that makes the 
relation of Christ's teaching to the previous 
age so revolutionary. He sees clearly that 
this new spirit of rejoicing sonship cannot 
be put into the old forms — the new wine 
into the old bottles. The new spirit neces- 
sarily breaks through them, if it is really 
honest and true to itself. Even of evil 
there is no final expulsion but by the new 
affection. And the disciple of Jesus must 
therefore pray, not the negative prayer, 
''Empty my soul of evil," but the positive 
prayer, ' ' Thy will be done, ' ' — the prayer for 
the reign of God within, as well as without. 

In all this, Christ's thought of religion 
as union with the will of God is able to 
take up into itself every element of truth 
in all these inadequate conceptions, and 
yet to transcend them all. There is fullness 
of life in the will of God, as Jesus conceives 
it. Here is the essence of life. 

In exact line, now, with Christ's own 



178 RELIGION AS LIFE 

thought, we men of the modem age must 
enlarge and deepen our conception of the 
will of God, if we are to meet the real de- 
mands of our time. For certain great con- 
victions have been forcing themselves in 
upon the minds of men in this modem 
age, that cannot leave our rehgious con- 
ceptions unaffected. 

We live in a world enlarged for our 
thought quite beyond the possibility of 
conception by earlier ages : enlarged in 
the infinite spaces of the revelations of 
astronomy ; enlarged in the might}' reaches 
of time, measured not only by geological, 
but by physical, research ; enlarged in 
perception of inner, endless energy, mi- 
croscopic as well as telescopic, and com- 
pelHng our admission even far beyond all 
possibility of vision. We find ourselves 
living not less in a vastly larger social 
environment, wide as the earth — every 
part of it tributary to every other, every 
part sharing in the life of every other ; 
there can be finally no exclusions. A man 
cannot help asking himself in such a world, 
*'Is thy God adequate to this enlarged 
universe ?" 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 179 

We live, too, in a unified world : unified, 
too, beyond all possible earlier conception ; 
unified in the thought of the universal 
forces of gravity and magnetism ; unified 
in the principle of the conservation of 
energy ; a world that acts as one world, as 
though permeated with one will. It is so 
permeated. For our time, as for no other, 
the thought of unity dominates. The world 
is one, past our denial. Man is one, in 
spite of his seeming duality. Man and 
the world are akin, and man is the micro- 
cosmus in a deeper sense than the old 
Greek philosopher could guess. Man and 
man are one in great central likenesses back 
of all racial differences. And man and God, 
too, are akin ; and our key to the under- 
standing of God is to be found within, not 
without. No age so certainly as ours 
should be able to say of man, with the 
Psalmist, ''Thou hast made him but little 
lower than God, and crownest him with 
glory and honor." Is thy God adequate 
to this unified world ? 

Moreover, whatever changes come in the 
great conception of evolution, mankind 
will never escape again from the idea of an 



i8o RELIGION AS LIFE 

evolving world. Physics, biology, embry- 
ology, psychology, sociology, make it im- 
possible for us to forget that man is, in 
some real sense, the goal of the whole phys- 
ical universe, containing within himself 
the promise of endless progress. And men 
have dared to dream that, in this evolution, 
physical, individual, and social, they could 
even catch the trend of the ages, the direc- 
tion of the mighty ongoing of God's pur- 
poses. Is thy God adequate to this evolv- 
ing world ? 

Once more, with the emphasis of the 
whole of modem science on the conception 
of law, men look in upon themselves and 
out upon the universe with other eyes. 
For the perception of law means discern- 
ment of the ways of the universe ; means, 
therefore, insight into its secrets and power 
to use its exhaustless energies. It means 
insight into economic and social as well as 
natural laws, into laws of personal relation, 
into the modes of the activity of God 
himself. The idea of law brings, thus, 
the glorious promise of world-mastery and 
self-mastery and of conquest of our high- 
est ideals — hope hitherto unimagined. Is 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 



I8l 



thy God adequate to this great world of 
law? 

We men, thus, of the modern time, who 
live in this enlarged world, in this unified 
world, in this evolving world, in this law- 
abiding world, are forced to enlarge our 
conception of God and of his will, if we 
have not already done so, to match this 
greater vision of the world and of men. 
For we shall not long believe in a God who 
is not greater than his world. 

When, then, we think of the enlarged 
world of our time, we shall not be able to 
make the measure of the will of God petty 
projects of any kind or order. Here is 
reason for hope. 

When we think of the unified world so 
necessary to our modern thought, we shall 
not be able to doubt that the will of God 
cannot be shut up to small fragments of life 
or of the race, but must be inclusive of all 
goods, and of all men, and consistent 
throughout. Here is reason for hope. 

When we think of the mighty evolving 
world, in the midst of which we see ourselves 
placed, we cannot but believe that the will 
of God is in it, working out great purposes 



i82 RELIGION AS LIFE 

that we can at least dimly discern, and in 
which, intelligently and triumphantly, we 
may share. Here again is hope. 

And when we think of the will of God, 
laid down in the laws of nature and of human 
nature, we find it no longer possible to 
think of him as mere onlooker in the drama 
of life ; since he is sharing in our very life, 
and we in his. For, in another's words, 
''Even the agony of the world's struggle 
is the very life of God. Were he mere 
spectator, perhaps he too would call life 
cruel. But, in the unity of our lives with 
his, our joy is his joy, our pain is his." 
Here too is hope, great and abiding. 

These convictions, thus, of our modem 
scientific age may help us to the largeness 
of the measure of the meaning which Jesus 
— and Paul after him — put into this 
thought of the will of God. Under these 
convictions, it is not too much to say, the 
ambitions of men to-day have taken on a 
titanic quality that he must be quite blind 
who does not see : financial and economic 
enterprises, world-wide in their outreach ; 
social projects and the pursuit of social 
ideals that concern not one nation alone. 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 183 

but all nations, and that go deep down 
into the heart of all living; missionary 
movements that, in their very nature, can- 
not be carried out without affecting the 
entire personal and social life of every race 
touched thereby, and changing the very 
face of nature. Every profession is sharing 
in this enlarged vision of positive achieve- 
ment. The physician has begun to dream 
of a race physically redeemed, through the 
triumphs of preventive, not merely re- 
medial, medicine. The lawyer is beginning 
to think he need be no mere attorney, but 
a servant of the public weal, put in trust 
with the great heritage of law. Every 
calling feels that it must more and more 
think of itself as a social servant, justified 
by nothing less. We seem to ourselves to 
be just awaking out of sleep, and out of 
dull lassitude of will. Now we see what 
life means. We live in an infinite world, 
and in that world we have our part to play. 
We live in a unified world, and just on that 
account we may work effects wide as the 
universe of God. We live in an evolving 
world, the direction of whose progress is 
not wholly hidden from us ; and into the 



i84 RELIGION AS LIFE 

very plans of God, therefore, it is given us 
to enter. We live in a law-abiding world, 
in which God himself is immanent ; and 
he works in us, both to will and to work of 
his own good pleasure. Is it any wonder 
that the ambitions of men of the present 
day, when seen thus in the large, seem to 
dwarf all previous aims of common men ? 
We build again, and with eager hope, our 
heaven-scaling tower, but now on founda- 
tions laid by God himself ; and the con- 
fused tongues give promise of changing 
into a higher harmony in the unity of our 
wills with the will of God. Now, one can- 
not so see these mightily enlarged ambitions 
of men without a great deepening of this 
always sufficient prayer, ''Our Father, who 
art in heaven, thy will be done, as in 
heaven, so on earth." 

But in order that into that prayer we 
may put ourselves with confidence and hope, 
there must underlie it that threefold as- 
simiption of Jesus : of the personal will of 
the Heavenly Father, of the heavenly life, 
and of the will of God pledged to the bring- 
ing of heaven to earth. For only he can 
see thus greatly his own ambitions who is 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 185 

able to gird and undergird his own will 
by faith in the eternal and all-sufficient 
will of God. He must know he attempts 
no hopeless task. And the more nearly 
men approach that rational, ethical de- 
mocracy, which seems to be the goal of all 
earthly endeavor, the more clearly will they 
see, in Nash's words, that ''every form of 
polity lays a certain tax upon the will. 
But democracy lays the heaviest tax of all. 
The vital relationships into which the in- 
dividual should enter are far more numerous 
than under any other form. And with 
each one of them he must go deeper. So 
the tax levied upon the earnest will is 
exceeding heavy. It cannot be paid, year 
in, year out, and paid with increasing 
gladness, unless the individual be assured 
that the resources of eternal good are at his 
back. And this certitude only possesses 
and pervades him when he has been made 
whole by trust. The idea of God given to 
him is a missionary idea. The good is 
forthputting, or it is nothing. God is an 
infinite missionary force. There is no fate 
in him that hinders him from putting forth 
his best. And the man who touches Christ 



1 86 RELIGION AS LIFE 

and is touched by him to the quick becomes 
like God, a missionary force, making of 
himself a redeeming energy that relates 
itself to the energy of God, as a man's 
right hand is related to the man. Hence- 
forth there is no fate in him, nothing which 
cannot be mobilized and put in the field 
in the service of his fellows." 

He who has come into this mighty faith 
of Christ's in the eternal personal will of 
the Father, is evermore capable of mighty 
convictions, mighty surrenders, mighty 
endeavors. And in this identification of 
his purposes with God's eternal purpose, it 
must seem to him, as it seemed to Paul, 
that he catches a glorious vision of sons of 
God, come for the first time into their true 
heritage — a consummation so wonderful 
that in the glory of it all the rest of the 
universe, animate and inanimate, seems to 
share. ''The whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth in pain with us until now." 
"For the earnest expectation of the creation 
waiteth for the revealing of the sons of 
God." 

Let us ask, now, one further question 
involved in this thought of life in the will 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 187 

of God. What would be the natural and 
inevitable effect upon a man's own inner 
life of steadily and whole-heartedly tak- 
ing on the will of God in the faith and spirit 
of Jesus ? First of all, the man whose sole 
purpose is to find and to do the will of God, 
as disclosed in the laws of his being and in 
the fundamental facts and personalities 
of life ; whose whole anxiety, thus, is to 
know the truth ; who can say of himself, 
^'I am come, not to do mine own will, but 
the will of him that sent me" ; — that man 
will naturally find this very purpose lifting 
him, as nothing else could, above personal 
prejudice and caprice. This will be true 
in the precise degree in which he has gen- 
uinely taken on that purpose. The very 
attitude of mind involved tends to clear 
the judgment, to sweep away befogging 
sophistries and subtleties, and to make it 
possible to give a judgment according to 
the facts. The man with this one deter- 
mining purpose, in his measure, thus, can 
truly say, ''As I hear, I judge: and my 
judgment is righteous ; because I seek not 
mine own will, but the will of him that 
sent me." He is, so, on the normal high- 



RELIGION AS LIFE 



road to the knowledge of all needful truth. 
His present determination to be utterly 
faithful to his present light is the best 
possible assurance of the larger light to come. 
''If any man willeth to do His will, he shall 
know of the teaching." The fourth gospel, 
therefore, naturally represents Jesus as 
saying : *'If ye abide in my word, then are 
ye truly my disciples ; and ye shall know 
the truth, and the truth shall make you 
free." 

Not only does this single all-absorbing 
purpose to do the will of God help the man 
to the knowledge of the truth ; but it also 
affects the temper of his life, and his capac- 
ity for work. To seek solely the will of 
God gives a singular singleness and sim- 
plicity to a life and makes it take on some- 
thing of real greatness. For the utterly 
candid soul has a transparency of life that 
seems to make it possible for the world 
of the spirit to shine through it with con- 
vincing power. Even in the case of the 
greatest, the supreme greatness is in the 
spirit of the service, not in the size of the 
task assigned. It requires the domination 
of a great purpose to make any life truly 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 189 

great, and there is no purpose so great as 
the purpose to do the will of God. Large 
capacity for work, too, is a natural resultant, 
just because of the concentration of aim 
involved in the thought that God has for 
me now just one thing to do, and because 
of the energizing sense of God, as back of 
all one's work when thus undertaken. 
And this latter faith also brings relief from 
anxious responsibility. When one's will 
is genuinely identified with the will of God, 
he can leave the results with God. As 
Cecil says, ''Duties are ours, events are 
God's. This removes an infinite burden 
from the shoulders of a miserable, tempted, 
dying creature." 

As surely, too, as a man's life can be no 
more permanent than the objects to which 
it is given, and as surely as ''the world pas- 
seth away and the lust thereof," so surely, 
on the other hand, ' ' he that doeth the will of 
God abideth forever. ' ' God's plan is an eter- 
nal plan. What is inwrought there abides. 
Nothing conceivable can give such abiding 
worth to a man's life as that he should have 
identified his aims with the eternal purposes 
of God. How else can one be said to have 



igo RELIGION AS LIFE 

triumphed in life ? To have learned 
steadily and wholeheartedly to take on 
the will of God in the faith and spirit of 
Jesus — this is indeed to have finished 
one's work, to have ''overcome," in the 
highest sense of that great word. Jesus 
meant to make possible to his disciples the 
clearness of judgment, the privilege, the 
power, the rest, the freedom, the fruit- 
fulness, the greatness and the triumph of 
that life. 

It seems hardly too much to say that the 
whole battle of the race has been for knowl- 
edge of the will of God and for obedience 
to it. The very meaning of education, too, 
is the learning of that will in the laws of 
one's own being, and of the world. If the 
line of thought we have been following is 
justified at all, the race has achieved, and 
education is finished, in just the proportion 
in which that will of God, in all its majesty, 
is known and obeyed. This — and this 
alone — is to have found oneself, to have 
found one's powers, to have discovered the 
possibilities of one's world. Whether stu- 
dents have recognized it or not, their whole 
endeavor for a true education has been this 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 191 

prayer to the God of their lives — "Thy 
will be done." 

May we not say it out, say it boldly, say 
it largely, say it with reverent but mighty 
ambition, say it with joy in our hearts, 
''Father, thy will be done" ? For human 
lips can frame no other prayer so great, 
none so full of blessing, of achievement, of 
peace, of rest, of joy, of eternal hope. 

Doubtless, some hard experiences await 
us. We need not hesitate plainly to say so. 
We should hardly think any enterprise 
worthy of our steel that did not have its 
risks, its difficulties, its obstacles, that 
challenged and gave worthy employ to all 
our powers. We mean to be men and 
women. But still these ills are all by the 
way, incidents and means, not ends ; and 
the prayer "Thy will be done," we may be 
sure, is not a prayer for calamities, but 
for greatest blessing. 

Doubtless, submission there must be — 
hours when we shall feel capable only of 
bare submission ; yet even that submission, 
when with cold chill hands we hold still to 
God, will prove "not a weakening denial of 
self, but a strengthening affirmation of 



192 RELIGION AS LIFE 

self." For the prayer, ''Thy will be done," 
we may be sure, is not submission to an 
arbitrary will without us, but the assertion 
of the highest self within us. 

Doubtless, many minor plans may fail, 
and we may know in them the bitterness 
of defeat ; but in the greatest purpose we 
cannot be defeated except by our own con- 
sent ; for we may take on God's purpose, 
and share in his triumph. The prayer, 
"Thy will be done," becomes thus no 
longer a plaintive cry, but a jubilant, 
triumphant note. For back of the prayer 
lies the triumphant conviction voiced in the 
crusades, '' God wills it." For it is a prayer 
for the triumph of God's loving purpose in 
us and in all men, a dedication of ourselves 
to the consummation of his mighty plans 
on earth and in heaven, dedication to the 
magnificent sharing in the infinite piurposes 
of God himself, "whose service is perfect 
freedom." 

I live in triumph. Lord, for thou 
Hast made thy triumph mine. 

We are to dare to believe in the splendor 
of the plans of God. We need not doubt, 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 193 

as Browning suggests in his Easter Day, 
that far beyond all the exhaustless beauty 
of nature, past all the wealth of art, past 
all the reach of ''circling sciences, philos- 
ophies and histories," past even all tender 
ministries of human love, stretches the 
reach of the will of God. These all are but 
the glories of the earth, God's antechamber. 

The wise, who waited there, could tell 
By these, what royalties in store 
Lay one step past the entrance door. 

We are brought, thus, to what sometimes 
seems to me the deepest of our modem 
hymns, just because it sounds so insistently 
the note of larger life, — of hope and 
tritimph in the will of God : 

Love, that wilt not let me go, 
I rest my weary soul in Thee ; 

1 give Thee back the life I owe, 
That in Thine ocean depths its flow 

May richer, fuller be. 

O Light, that folio west all my way, 

I yield my flickering torch to Thee ; 
My heart restores its borrowed ray, 
That in Thy sunshine's blaze its day 
May brighter, fairer be. 



194 RELIGION AS LIFE 

Joy, that seekest me through pain, 
I cannot close my heart to Thee ; 

1 trace the rainbow through the rain, 
And feel the promise is not vain 

That mom shall tearless be. 

Cross, that liftest up my head, 

I dare not ask to fly from Thee ; 

1 lay in dust life's glory dead, 

And from the ground there blossoms red 
Life that shall endless be. 

No goal can be greater than that of 
sharing in the hfe of God. Here is the 
essence of Hfe. 



T^HE following pages contain advertisements 
of Macmillan books by the same author 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Moral and Religious Challenge of 
Our Times 

By henry CHURCHILL KING 

President of Oberlin College. Author of " The Ethics of Jesus," 
"The Laws of Friendship," etc., etc. 

Cloth, i2mo^ $i-SO net; by mail, $1.62 

" A thoughtful work, designed for thoughtful observers and 
students of the novel and rapidly changing conditions under 
which great problems of human happiness and national des- 
tiny are being slowly worked out. ... It is instructive rather 
than argumentative — this calm, impersonal survey of un- 
toward developments in human affairs. Like the more ob- 
jective social philosophers, who go down into the arena and 
fight, this clear-visioned, secluded student of civilization ar- 
rives at conclusions adverse to the existing order. His argu- 
ment is all the more eifective because of its freedom from any 
tinge of partisan prejudice or class distinction." — Philadel- 
phia North Ainerican. 

" With much insight into the latest teachings of economics, 
psychology and comparative religion, the president of Oberlin 
studies the problem of human development in its entirety, as 
a world problem. Perhaps the master stroke of the book is 
the most suggestive contrast between ancient and modern 
civilization." — Boston Advertiser. 

" President King first makes a careful survey of the out- 
standing external features of the present life of the world, to 
see the challenge that they bring to the moral and religious 
forces, and then he does the same thing for the new inner 
world of thought . . . the book is, above all, practical, as is 
everything from this author's pen." — Buffalo Express. 

"A serious and wise discussion of the meaning of the 
present age." — Kansas City Star. 

" Its appearance is timely and undoubtedly it will aid in a 
better understanding of the difficulties that are to be disposed 
of, as well as indicate the spirit of broad humanity in which 
they should be approached." — Knickerbocker Press. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Ethics of Jesus ^o^^ 



Clothf JBtnOy $1.^0 net; by mail, $1.62 



" I know no other study of the ethical teaching of Jesus so 
scholarly, careful, clear and compact as this. A large amount 
of learning, sound judgment and fresh insight is here pre- 
sented in brief compass and in a style that any one can under- 
stand." — Extract from letter of Professor G. H. Pabner of 
Harvard U^iiversity. 

"An original, able and stimulating discussion." — Biblio- 
theca Sacra. 

" A real contribution to the literature of ethics." — Boston 
Transcript. 

" It is the chief value of this book that the lay reader will 
find stated in it with great clearness and simplicity the con- 
clusions reached by some of the more radical analytical 
scholars." — Outlook. 

" A capital book which teachers and preachers will find in- 
valuable." — Literary Digest. 

" Valuable both as showing how much we really know of 
the teaching of Jesus and the immense value of this teaching 
for the modern world in which we live." — Christian Register. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Laws of Friendship, Human and ^>" > ^ ^ 

Divine 

Haverford Library Lectures 

ClotA, i2mo, $T.2^ net; by mail, $1.34 

" By his spiritual intentions, his apt illustrations, and gen- 
uine human sympathy, Dr. King glorifies a subject like this. 
It enables him to speak out his inner self. He believes that 
the laws which make human friendships possible and endur- 
ing, apply to the proper relations between God and men." 
— Methodist Review. 

"It is a book which it would be well if all young people 
would read, married people also, and people of all classes." — 
Book News Monthly. 

" This book is full of sermon themes and thought inspiring 
sentences worthy of being made mottoes for conduct." — 
Chicago Tribune. 

Rational Living B T U ^ 

Some Practical Inferences from Modern Psychology 

Cloth^ ismo, 2^1 pages ^ $1.2^ net; by mail., $1.36 

" An able conspectus of modern psychological investigation 
viewed from the Christian standpoint ; it is an excellent ex- 
position of its bearing on life, and it is a lucid and inspiring 
exhortation to rational living." — Philadelphia Ledger. 

"Easy to understand and interesting for all thoughtful 
minds." — Living Church. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Reconstruction in Theology 

Cloth, 121710., ^57 pages, %i.^o net ; by mail, $i.6i 

"The student of theology who is preparing to preach a 
vital Christianity, and, as well, the layman who is seeking for 
a higher and more satisfactory interpretation of the modern 
movement of life and thought, will find here wise guidance 
and wholesome inspiration." — H. P. De Forest in Bibliotheca 
Sacra. 

" It is a book that the busy man delights to read — frank 
and open in its discussions, simple in its statement of great 
principles, and free from the terminology of theological sci- 
ence." — JV. D. Vaji Voorhis in the Christiaji Evangelist. 



Theology and the Social Consciousness 

Cloth, 121910, 2^2 pages, $/.2j net ; by mail, $1.36 

" The strength of Professor King's eminently sane and help- 
ful book is not in brilliant and suggestive sentences, but in its 
clear unfolding of an elemental truth, and fearless and vigor- 
ous application of that truth to religious thinking. One can- 
not read it carefully without realizing that his thinking has 
been cleared of much mistiness, and that he has a deepened 
conception of a truth of superlative importance to which he 
has but to be steadily loyal to find a rational interpretation of 
his spiritual experience, and a safe guide amid the mazes of 
theological speculation." — The Congregationalist . 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Seeming Unreality of the 
Spiritual Life 

Cloth, i2mo, $i.j^o net ; by mail, $i.6o 

"A book of surpassing interest and value." — Book News. 

"A subtle and suggestive presentation of the reaction from 
materialism." — Boston Advertiser. 

" A book invaluable for the provision of Christian armor. 
The vast army of ministers who study it will find in it as clear 
an expression as is likely to be made, of the doubts which 
assail the thinking mind, and of the rational and logical argu- 
ments which must dispel them." — Christian Herald. 



Personal and Ideal Elements in Education 

Cloth, i2mo, syy pages, $i.^o net ; by 7?iail, $i,6i 

"To the student of modern educational problems these 
addresses will be of interest and value. Their distinguishing 
characteristics are spiritual perception, broad-mindedness, 
practical good sense in the application of fundamental prin- 
ciples to current questions, and suggestiveness of thought." — 
The Outlook. 

" Every president of a school among us should read this 
book ; every teacher, too, as for that. And the preacher who 
will not be helped by such a chapter as that on Christian 
training and the revival is blind to the wider meaning of his 
ministry." — Christian Advocate. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



MAY 22 m3 



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